


The Last Traveler

by ShanaStoryteller



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aliens, Artificial Intelligence, Ensemble Cast, Found Family, Multi, Outer Space, Science Fiction, Sometimes Literally, Space Pirates, Time Travel, a story of creating humanity in the places you can't find it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2020-09-27 17:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 40,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20411305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShanaStoryteller/pseuds/ShanaStoryteller
Summary: Time travel is possible - but only in one direction.Nearly three thousand years in the future, the only living humans are those that have traveled forward in time. They're rare, and all the more valuable because of it.Isaac Roberts, adjunct professor of robotics and kidnap victim, is the last traveler.





	1. Chapter 1

Isaac is used to people judging him for his looks first and everything else second.

People usually either judge him as too young or too black. Sometimes even too pretty, which is flattering in all the ways that it’s not insulting. So not that many ways.

But this, he has to admit, is a first.

“Let go of me!” he shouts at a passing guard. He thinks they’re cops, they’ve got guns on their hips the typical lack of empathy in their eyes, but he doesn’t recognize the uniform. It’s white, about the only thing that is in these damp, dirty cells. It just makes them all look like janitors. His father would be appalled and begin lecturing him about keeping his head down and not getting shot, but he’s been here for over a day, and he’s sick of it. He wants to go home. “I’m not whoever the hell you think I am! I didn’t do anything!”

The cell doesn’t even have bars, just four cement walls and an iron door, and small window just big enough to see through. 

The officer taps something on the door so the window recedes back. He’s figured out that the cells are only almost soundproof, and they can hear him if he yells. He can never hear them if they don’t want him too, though.

“Shut up.” Her icy blue eyes the only bit of color on her, her hair tucked up under her cap and her skin nearly blending into her uniform.

He does not shut up. “I wasn’t loitering, I _work there! _I’m Isaac Roberts, I’m a robotics professor.” Adjunct, but it still counts. “You can google me! I even have my ID on me, I can show you if you’ll just stop and listen for a second-”

It shouldn’t be a surprise, exactly, when she turns on her heal, reaches for something on her belt, and jams it in between the bars of the cell, but it is, and he flinches away before it even touches him. He doesn’t move back fast enough, and the taser sends a painful jolt of electricity through his skin, and he stumbles back from it, the smell of his own burning flesh enough to make his stomach roll even through the pain.

He trips and falls over, hitting his head hard enough that he cries out and curls up on his side, squeezing his eyes shut and breathing deeply to keep from vomiting.

“Shut up,” the officer says again, but this time it sounds like she’s laughing.

Isaac curls his hands into fists, even as he lies there unable to move, and what he can’t help but think, despite his best efforts is that he’s going to die here.

Alone, in this dirty cell, with his coworkers and students and father wondering what happened to him. He wonders if they’ll spin some sort of take about him resisting arrest, about him being violent, if they’ll scour his social media for a picture that makes him look like a thug, if they’ll make him take a mug shot they can splash on a news reels before they kill him.

Or if maybe they’ll just take the photo after he’s dead and hope no one notices the difference.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there on the cold stone floor, waiting for the waves of pain to leave his body, for the sharp throbbing in his head to soften to a dull ache. It all still hurts when he hears his cell door opening, and he scrambles to his feet. Or, well, attempts to. He slips and lands hard on his knees. He’s forced to break his fall on with his hands, and he remembers only after he’s done it that it’s bad for his wrists.

There’s a soft thump, like something’s been thrown in his cell, and he hopes it’s some clean clothes.

He pushes himself up onto his knees and looks up.

It’s not clothes.

It’s a little girl, maybe around eight or nine years old, and she’s staring at him with wide, scared brown eyes. Her face and clothes are dirty, and she’s got a split lip, but Isaac can’t tell if it’s because someone hit her or if her dry lips have just cracked. “Shit,” he says, then winces. “Sorry.”

She doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring at him, and he’s not good with kids, especially hurt, scared kids.

“Where are your parents?” he tries. What’s she even doing here? What crime could a little kid have possibly committed?

Then again, he hadn’t done anything wrong, and he’s still here, and he’s not sure if they’re planning on letting him leave.

Her eyes well up, and she rubs her arm across her face, trying to scrub them away before they can fall. She opens her mouth, sound comes out, and Isaac thinks he’s having a stroke. It takes him an embarrassingly long moment to realize that she’s not speaking English.

His Spanish is excellent, and his French is less than excellent, but he doesn’t understand a word of what she’s saying. The ebb and flow of her speech makes him think she’s speaking Arabic, but he doesn’t even know enough of the language to recognize it with any certainty.

“Hey, slow down,” he says, like her saying words he doesn’t understand will suddenly make more sense if she’s not saying them as quickly. He holds up his hands in what he hopes is a universal gesture meaning slow down, and her rush of words trickles to a stop. Her eyebrows are pushed together, and she looks from him to his hands in confusion. She steps closer, hesitates, then darts a glance at his face one more time before reaching out her hands and slapping them against his in a high five.

The laughter bubbling up his throat takes him by surprise, and he laughs all the harder for it, until his chest aches for an entirely pleasant reason. She’s glaring at him, arms crossed with an exaggerated little kid pout. Clearly she doesn’t appreciate being laughed at. “Sorry,” he says, even though he’s pretty sure she can’t understand him. It seems important to say anyway. He points at himself and says, “Isaac.”

“Isaac,” she repeats dutifully, then points at herself, “Sunny!”

“Hi Sunny.” The good humor drains from him as they look at each other, the reality of their situation hitting him harder than it had before. She’s frowning now, looking at him in a serious, considering sort of way that he wouldn’t normally expect from a kid. “It looks like we’re stuck here together.”

She responds in Arabic, and then laughs a little at his lost look. She holds out her hand, and when he goes to high five her, she grabs it, holding on. 

~

Isaac had never really thought about wanting kids, and he’d have thought being stuck with one in a tiny cell would be terrible. 

It’s not, but he’s not exactly reconsidering his stance on kids either. He’s sure they would both be a lot more annoyed with the other if they weren’t both stuck in survival mode, if they weren’t clinging to each other as literally the only person around them that isn’t out to hurt them. 

Sunny’s English ends up being better than his Arabic, but that’s not exactly saying much. The British couple who run the middle eastern restaurant on his block probably knows more Arabic than he does. She’s still limited, painfully so, and they can’t really communicate, not in any sort of complex way. He eventually gets across that he’s asking about her mom and dad, but her eyes just well up with tears and she shakes her head. Isaac doesn’t know what that means, if they’re dead or gone or somewhere in this prison with them. “Okay,” he says, patting her hair when she finally stops crying, “Okay. Please okay.”

As far he’s been able to discover, her repertoire includes: okay, yes, no, Mom, Dad, puppy, car, and please. He’ll talk to her in English, she’ll respond in Arabic, and neither of them have any idea what the other is saying, but sometimes it’s just nice to listen to someone else speak.

Solitary confinement is a special sort of hell, and anything is better than that, even stuck with a little girl whom he doesn’t know and he can’t communicate with. It does make him wonder though, and worry. What reason could they have for putting her in this cell with him? He can only think of one. 

Overcrowding. 

This place is so full of prisoners that they’ve started doubling up the cells, when really they’re only barely big enough for one person, never mind two. He doesn’t understand why. Are they just going to kill him? For what? His dad has to be looking for him, his work and his students must have noticed that they’re professor hasn’t shown up to work. 

Right? 

Or whoever’s taken them has spun a lie about him being some sort of criminal, and there’s no way his father will buy that, but what’s old man against the type of people who kidnap little girls and put them in cages with strange men? 

Days slip into weeks, and Isaac is silently, guiltily grateful for Sunny’s presence. He can just tell he’s on the edge of some sort of mental breakdown, as them getting out of here seems less and less likely, and the only way he can keep himself in check is by focusing on Sunny, by trying to get her to eat and drink and holding her when she cries. If he didn’t have a kid to look after, he doesn’t know what he’d do, he’d probably be half mad already. He sleeps with her tucked against his chest, his back to the cell door. There’s only one bed, and even if there wasn’t, he likes making sure she can’t be taken from him while he’s sleeping. He’s already had too many nightmares about waking up to find his cell empty, to Sunny being taken somewhere and never knowing what happens to her, if she’s dead or alive.

She’s not the one that ends up being dragged from their cell in the middle of the night.

He’s jerked to his feet, being forced upright by a person on either side holding onto his arm, and he presses his heals against the floor, trying to pull from their grip. “Stop it! Let me go!”

They only force him forward, his feet dragging against the floor. “Isaac!” Sunny cries, and he turns his head and one of the officers has an arm around her waist, holding her back. “Isaac! No! No please! Please Isaac!”

She twists so she can bite the arm holding her, and the officer lets her go with a curse. “You brat-”

“NO!” She grabs onto Isaac’s leg, trying to tug him back. “No!”

One of the officers holding him leans out and kicks her in the side. He hears a horrible sound which he thinks might be a rib snapping, and she tumbles to the ground, her scream high and primal and somehow so much worse than he’d imagined.

“Stop it, don’t hurt her!” he shouts, struggling to get out of their grip. “Let me go!”

They don’t react, pretending he hasn’t said anything at all, and he watches them slam the cell door shut behind him, still struggling to get back to her. What if her rib really is broken? What if it punctured a lung?

The last he sees of Sunny before they turn a corner is her curled up on the cold floor, her dark eyes wet as they watch him leave.

“You have to get her a doctor,” he tells them urgently, fear closing around his throat. “She could be really hurt.”

“We don’t need her unhurt, just alive,” the officer on his left says, marching him through a set of security doors, and he blinks at the sudden onslaught of bright light.

Everything here is as blindingly white as the officer’s uniforms, clean pure white floors and walls, like they’ve just stepped into a hospital but even more sterile. Medical officers will at least try and spruce themselves up with some hideous wallpaper.

“She might not stay alive if you don’t check on her,” he snaps, trying not to be disoriented. How could this just be behind a set of doors? It was so dark and dirty and miserable in those cells, and somehow this was right next to them?

“Don’t worry about her,” the officer says, and they take him into another room and start pushing him back into something hard and flat and forcing his limbs to straighten.

Isaac cranes his neck around, trying to see, and he maybe it’s the weeks without proper food sleep, but he’s so confused, he feels like his thoughts can’t keep up with the things happening around him, which is an unfamiliar sensation for him. He’s used to being, if not the smartest person in the room, then at least in the ballpark, but nothing he’s seeing is making any sense to him. “Why are you taking an MRI?” he asks, finally recognizing the machine they’re forcing him into. Or at least he thinks it does. He doesn’t remember MRIs looks quite like that. They don’t answer, strapping him into it with thick leather cuffs around his wrists and ankles. Then, they do it around his thighs, stomach, and chest, and on one hand it makes sense, whatever they’re looking for won’t show up if he’s squirming around in there, but it doesn’t make him like it any less. “What are you doing?”

“Test subject one hundred and fifty three is secure,” one of the officers says.

“Excellent,” says a new voice, and there’s a woman in a lab coat standing in the observational window, her bright red hair the only spot of color in this whole room. Standing next to her is a man that looks to be twice her age with a full grey beard. “Calibrate for maximum travel capacity.”

For the first time, Isaac sees the officers hesitating. “Maximum? But we don’t know when he’ll-”

“And we never will, if we don’t test it,” the bearded man says briskly. “My estimations are around twenty five to twenty seven hundred years.”

The officers share a wary glance but seem to know better than to argue. They start pushing him into the MRI machine, and he calls out, “Are you a doctor? There’s a little girl, her name is Sunny, and she’s hurt-”

“Sequence initializing,” the woman’s voice says clinically.

The machine whirs to life, and he quickly realizes that whatever this, whatever they’re doing, it has nothing to do with magnetic resonance imaging.

If it did, it wouldn’t hurt this much.

He thinks he’s screaming, but he can’t tell, can’t think past the pain long enough to figure it out. It feels like thousands of needles being pushed into his skin until they reach the other side, and then like claws are tearing open his skin, not just in one place but all over, there’s not a single inch of him that isn’t currently in agonizing pain.

Next there’s the oppressive sensation of pressure, like his body is being pressed into a different shape, and it’s so foreign and uncomfortable that he prefers the pain, because at least that’s a sensation he can understand, but this – he doesn’t even have the words for this, like his body is made of jello and being hit with a hammer.

Then he’s no longer on his back, no longer in the machine, no longer inside anything at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it! 
> 
> the next part is already written, and i'll post it tomorrow. after that this story will get updated in rotation with my other works. because this is only a prologue, it's about half the length that most chapters will be. 
> 
> i'm still on the fence on whether or not this is an appropriate story to host on ao3. there's a high possibility i'll end up moving it over to my website instead. if that's the case, don't worry, i'll give people plenty of warning and post a link so people can still find it. (my website still needs a lot of work)
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> because of ao3's chapter naming conventions, i renamed prologue as chapter one for simplicity's sake

Thargelia had to give up a lot to keep her programming functional, to remain not only part of the Agency, but also the head of it.

Humans are a hot commodity these days. Everyone wants to say that they met one or worked with one or hired one. Across the galaxy, people tell stories about the species that burned too hot and too fast, who died before they had a chance to begin. A chameleon species, who from the stories could be anything and everything given the proper motivation. A supernova people, and everyone so did love getting their hands on a bit of starlight.

It’s why her business model is sound.

Find those rare travelers who popped into their time, train them, house them, feed them, give them the choice of many lucrative and interesting career paths, and pocket half their check for all her trouble.

The problem is, humans are drying up. There are less and less travelers, and those that had traveled before are disappearing too, because she’s far from the only person interested at profiting off human curiosities.

Most people aren’t as nice as her, though. She offers opportunity, comfort, fairness.

All the traffickers provided was destitution or death.

But it’s fine. Her team it’s on earth, awaiting the arrival of the last human traveler. No over eager traffickers are going to get in their way. Not that any of them had been able to for the past five years. 

After this human, second generation or even more removed more will be their only option.

She’ll make it work. She always does.

~

Tara isn’t a prisoner here. She can leave whenever she chooses. Her pale pink overalls are a practical choice, not a prison uniform, and she keeps her white hair cut to just below her chin so it’s just long enough to pull back if she has too, but isn’t to heavy when she doesn’t, and not because it’s regulation length. 

“Fifteen hundred denarios?” the Mitger growls, a species known for having a dozen eyes crowded on their faces and for their bright blue skin which is several shades lighter than Tara’s own navy skin. “This is robbery!”

They are not known for their pleasantness.

“It’s a bargain,” she retorts. “Your entire engine is shot, this is the completely wrong ship to take into deep space. If you want to get running again, and you want to actually make it to another station, that’s how much it’s going to cost. The parts alone are going to run me over a thousand. This is practically charity.” Really, fixing this ship for the bare minimum is just the quickest way to get rid of him.

What’s he even doing this far out of the more well trafficked orbits? Most of the appeal of setting up shop in the literal middle of nowhere is that she wouldn’t have to deal with any customers.

“What would a blank skinned Viatorum know about charity?” he sneers. 

_ Blank skinned?  _ She has stars from galaxies he wouldn’t even be able to name inked into her skin, how dare he -

A single, steady beep emits from one of her monitors. She knows which one without have to look, but nearly breaks her neck in her haste to set her eyes on it, heart in her throat. There’s code rushing across it too fast for her to read, but that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. She knows exactly what it’s saying.

_ Finally _ .

“Get out,” she snaps, “I’m busy.”

He opens her mouth to argue, and Tara doesn’t give him the chance, grabbing him by his exceptionally bony shoulders and pushing him out of her shop. “I’ll fix your ship. Come back in two days.”

“Two days!” His face contorts into anger. She doesn’t have time for it and slams the door in his face.

She runs over to the monitor, scrolling through the mixes of ones and zeros until she finds what she needs. Coordinates.

When she sees them, she curses and slams the flat of her palm against the table. She doesn’t even have to enter them, she knows exactly where that is. There’s no way she’ll make it there in time, not even if she had the materials to bend several of the rules of time and space. She’s a mechanic and an engineer, not a miracle worker.

She needs backup. _They_ need back up.

As Roksana would say - it’s time to get the band back together.

What Roksana is actually going to say might contain several curse words, but if she hadn’t wanted Tara to reach out to them, she should have thought of that before getting herself arrested. 

~

“Hey, Han,” says a slim, petite Benaid with the typical pale white colored skin and wide pupiless eyes. He only comes up to Ji-won’s elbow, but he’s at least three times as strong as him, which is saying something. It’s obvious by the way he yanks a snarling, pissed off criminal on an electric lead like she weighs nothing at all.

“Barneet,” he responds, cordial. The tax evader who’s meekly following behind him seems even less impressive in comparison. Not that this is really a game he’s interested in winning.

Ji-won doesn’t like being a bounty hunter.

But he’s a quarter Human, a quarter Tilethikos, and half Pugnator.

The human is valuable, and the Tilethikian species is known for their empathy and intelligence.

It’s the Pugnator that damns him.

He’s never been able to get a clear answer on how his gentle, quiet father had ended up with a warrior bride of a species that spoke more in crushed bones and bloody enemies than actual words. It’s not like he can ask his mother either. She died a week after he was born, fighting over the rights to farm a couple miles of land that wasn’t even fertile enough to produce grass.

He can’t hide it either, there’s no way he can pass as mostly human, not like his father can. So he’s stuck doing this – hunting down wanted criminals and turning them in for reward money.

The irony isn’t lost on him.

He’s a wanted criminal. If anyone found out who he was – what he used to do – then he’d always be on the run. The bounty on his head is ten times that of anyone he’s brought it.

Maybe that’s why Roksana betrayed them.

As soon as the thought enters his mind, he tosses it out. It’s been a long five years. Most days, he can keep himself from thinking about his former captain. 

Most days.

He turns his criminal in, gets his paltry reward, and hurries back to his ship, nearly hitting his head as he opens the door as he pulls himself inside. It’s cramped, a little thing, barely big enough for two people to squeeze inside. Addy is practically on his lap the few times they’ve flown together.

Often, he can’t help but remember the ship he piloted when he still answered to Roksana, the ease to which that massive ship responded to him, the hum of the engine beneath his feet and his friends at his - 

Well, it can’t be helped. 

Addy has most of the world’s knowledge locked up somewhere in his head, but he’s not a mechanic, and it’s a struggle for the two of them to keep even a small ship in decent enough shape for cross-galaxy space travel. They make do with what they have.

Ji-won enters in the coordinates for Earth more out of habit than anything else. He’s flown from this particular Internplanetary Criminal Collection Center enough times that he could make the trip blind.

He checks his fuel level, then the crystal matrix, and he has enough fuel, and this crystal set is holding up much better than the last one.

Flying home usually takes around three days. But at lightspeed, it should only take about six hours.

Ji-won didn’t understand the math of it all himself, but he’s applied the equation enough times that he could make it work, even with a dinky ship on the periphery of deep space. He sends a quick message to Addy to let him know when he should be arriving, double checks his equation one last time, and shifts the lever forward.

If there’s something he’ll never get tired of, it’s the streak of starlight at the corner of his eyes as he shoots off into space. 

~

Artificial Intelligence Human Simulation Unit #5432, more commonly known as Adexios, less commonly known as Addy, is falling apart.

He’s not quite the last of his kind, but he’s very, very close. It would be incorrect to say that the Pandora Program had been a failure. It had, in fact, been a fantastic success. But they hadn’t actually wanted humans made of metal and code. They’d wanted something obedient and useful, and humans had only ever excelled at being the later.

That was over three hundred years ago. He only knows of one other unit still functioning, but considering one of her ongoing workplace goals is to see to his code deletion, it doesn’t really do him a lot of good.

He’s falling apart, and no one can fix him. Even hundreds of years later, he’s too complicated to reverse engineer, and all the copies of the manual and his designs were destroyed long ago.

So now he’s here. A forgotten android on a forgotten planet.

No one lives on Earth anymore. It’s just him and Ji-won, and he’s stuck trying to stop himself from falling apart, stuck trying not to die before Ji-won. The prognosis, at his most optimistic, is not good.

Falling in love while he was falling apart is the worst thing he’s ever done. It’s one thing to die. It’s another thing entirely to die and leave someone behind. Adexios has tried leaving, has tried running, but Ji-won always follows him, even all the way to a backwater planet where there’s nothing to eat but mostly poisonous plants and animals almost too tough to digest.

He misses food. He doesn’t need it, but he’s designed to appear almost entirely human, and he can eat, can taste the food he eats, and he _misses _it. He misses basbousa most of all, but whenever he says that Ji-won gets a pinched look around his eyes, so Addy doesn’t say that anymore. 

A high pitched beep echoes through the air, pulling him from his morose thoughts, then another. Addy freezes, not sure if he’s dreaming, but then it happens again, and he scrambles into action, tripping over his feet and banging his hip against the side table in his rush. Pain shoots up his side, because of course his touch sensors are still going strong after three hundred years, even if nothing else is. He reaches the out of date tablet mounted on the wall, and swipes it open. It still works, if only barely, crackling and responding sluggishly. It should be irritating, but Addy can’t help but be sympathetic. He knows the feeling. 

A Viatorum fills the screen, shoulder length white hair and dark navy skin. None of the tattoos Adexios knows she has are visible. He’s grateful that Ji-won isn’t here for this. He’d break the tablet as soon as he saw her face. 

“What’s wrong?” He hasn’t spoken to Tara in years. Not since everything fell apart and they all went their separate ways. She wouldn’t be calling him if it wasn’t an emergency, 

“You’re on Earth,” she says, and he blinks, because, okay, clearly she’s been keeping closer tabs on him than he has her. All he’d known was that she was somewhere in deep space, but well - that may have been more out of caution than because of Tara’s desire to cut all ties from him. What he doesn’t know can’t be hacked out of him, if Thargelia ever catches up to him and tears him open. He hopes that if that happens, Ji-won won’t be here for that either. “Tell me Ji-won is with you.”

“He’s off planet working on a job,” he says. “He should be back in a few hours.” There’s not a lot of work someone of Ji-won’s background can get. None of them are pleasant, and few are legal. They are trying so very hard to stay on the legal side of things. For once.

Tara slams her fist into the screen. The crack that appears across is on hers, not his, but for a moment it looks as if her anger had managed to force its way through the connection and break his tablet. “Damnit!”

“What’s wrong?” he repeats, hoping he’s able to hide his reaction to her outburst. She’s always been so controlled, so perfectly calm, and so anything that can make her act like this already has him worried. “Why do you need Ji-won?”

Her lips press together and she asks, “Is this connection secure?”

He doesn’t answer, only crosses his arms. His body may be falling apart, but his mind is perfectly functional. For now. As if any connection into his home wouldn’t be secure. 

“The last one is coming, and Roksana just sent me coordinates and a time,” she says. “I’m too far away to try and intercept. But you and Ji-won are right there. I was hoping Ji-won could do it.”

If he had a stomach, it would lurch. He still feels a little queasy anyway. Roksana, who betrayed them, who left them for dead. Who found them and dusted them off and brought them together in the first place. “How could Roksana have gotten anything to you? I thought – they still have her locked up, don’t they?”

Roksana had abandoned them, had been captured, and everything else had fallen apart.

Tara ignores his question. “Can Ji-won make it back to intercept? We’re only going to have a two minute grace period after he arrives before the Agency swoops in.”

“You know this isn’t our job anymore, right?” he asks. He’s already grabbed a spare tablet to patch a message through to Ji-won. “What’s the time and coordinates?”

She tells him the coordinates, and it’s not too bad, right over where the main facility was, so at least it’s on the same continent. Then she tells him the time of arrival, and he just stares at her. “That’s in an hour! There’s no way Ji-won can make it back in time!”

“Then the Agency will get him,” Tara says, her anger already folded back, her silver eyes perfectly calm, like they’re discussing the weather. “Is that what you want?”

He scowls. Obviously it isn’t, obviously he wouldn’t have spent twenty years by her and Roksana’s side, doing what they did, if that was something he wanted. 

“How do you even know this information is correct?” he asks.

She rolls her eyes. “Roksana sent it through. It’s correct.” She rubs at the bridge of her nose, “The Agency is really going to get him. The last human from the past.”

He’s known Tara a long time, just as long as he’s known Roksana, ever since the both of them crash landed on the planet he was hiding out at and dragged him with them on the type of adventure he’d only read about before. 

Stars above, Tara had been a teenager when they first met. He feels old. He _is _old. 

“I’ll go,” he says. He doesn’t realize he’s made up his mind until the words are already out of his mouth. “I don’t have any viable spaceships, but there’s a hovercraft that’s fast enough to get me there in time.” Barely. 

Tara’s head snaps up, her eyes wide. “You can’t do that! With your luck, your legs will stop working and you’ll be caught and dragged before Madame President. Who would love nothing more than to wipe your memory banks clear herself, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“How could I forget?” he asks dryly, opening a kitchen cabinet and taking down a box of spare electronics. He grabs a remote, an old communicator, and a computer missing it’s screen out of the box and starts stripping them for parts. “Theogalia’s the reason I’m hiding out at a planet that’s been empty for six hundred years.” And why he’s been hiding for the past hundred or so years. He’d tried faking his death a couple of times, but it never seemed to stick. He rustles around for piece of tinfoil, and ends up using a gum wrapper. He undoes a stack of manuals for basic robots just so he can take the rubberband. There’s a soldering iron around here somewhere – oh, there! Excellent. “I’m not going to fight. Or run. I wouldn’t be able to get him out of there before we got caught.”

“Is that a slingshot?” Tara asks. Neither her voice or expression changes, but he knows she’s holding back a laugh. 

He holds it up proudly, along with a piece of smooth metal no bigger than the size of the nail on his pinky. “Yes. And a tracker. I’m not strong enough to take on a half dozen Agency mercenaries. But I can at least get a tracker on this person, and maybe if we’re lucky they’ll have to stop somewhere to refuel, or have engine trouble, or – well, maybe we’ll be able to save them.”

“I thought this wasn’t our job anymore?” She’s almost smiling.

“It’s not,” he says. “But you’re asking for help. So I’m going to give it to you.”

Tara softens. “Thank you.”

“Just say something nice at my funeral. I’m a dead man once Ji-won finds out what I did while he was out.” He gives Tara a cocky salute, and it’s almost like how it was before. He moves to end the call, but hesitates. “It’s good to see you again.”

She smiles at him, a rare expression that isn’t a scowl, and closes the line herself.

Well, time to go do something stupid, unnecessary, and suicidal.

Just like the old days.

~

Tara isn’t a pilot, or a captain, or someone who particularly enjoys flying a metal tube through space at breakneck speeds. She’s a mechanic. When necessary, she’s even a passable nuclear engineer. But she’s not a pilot.

Luckily, these days ships will pilot themselves. Especially fussy tourist ships that have no business being flown into deep space to begin with. She told the Mitger that his ship would be ready in two days.

Instead she does a barely passable patch job in six hours, considers feeling guilty for a moment, and instead throws her dresser’s worth of belongings into a couple duffle bags, inputs Earth’s coordinates, and takes that jerk’s ship into the sky. She hopes it will survive the trip.

She also hopes that Adexios preps Ji-won for her arrival. She’d prefer to miss any sort of temper tantrum he feels like throwing. Back in the day, he had perfect outlets for his aggression, like beating up anyone who got in their way or throwing Roksana and Addy around the training mat until he hated himself a little less. 

For obvious reasons, neither of those options are available to him anymore. 

Unless he’s on earth hunting for his own food like some sort of prehistoric caveman, which honestly Tara wouldn’t put past him. It would make his mother proud, at least. 

~

Adexios has seen many human travelers, has made what a generous person might call a career out of it. First as a trainer, and then as a trafficker. But this is the first time he’s seen one appear. When he was a trainer, he only got them after they’d been captured and decontaminated, and as trafficker they’d almost never managed to beat the Agency to them, and even when they did, he hadn’t exactly been in any condition to be on the collection team. No, that job had usually fallen to Ji-won and Roksana while he and Tara waited on the ship. 

The coordinate locations were closely guarded secrets, and the Agency hovered around the forgotten planet Earth like locusts, waiting for travelers to show up so they could snatch them up. There were a fair number of poachers who circled the blue and green planet, hoping to get lucky and snatch up a human that the Agency wasn’t poised to grab, but there weren’t many left these days. And the few that were weren’t usually willing to get in Roksana’s way. 

When Ji-won had wanted to move here, of all places on this very large planet, Adexios hadn’t argued. They’d never said anything out loud, swore up and down they were done with trafficking and running. Yet, in the whole universe, they chose to settle on Earth, still ended up in the place were so many travelers popped into their time.

They were about as good at lying to each other as they were at lying to themselves.

He’s sitting up in a tall tree, waiting. Climbing had been a pain, putting too much strain on his already failing support structures and gears. He’s going to have to wait until Ji-won gets home to help him down if he doesn’t want to break some other part of him that he has no idea how to fix.

The only warning of the traveler’s arrival that he gets is a heat shimmer in the air, then a slice of blinding light and a sound that would cause his ears to ring if he was organic.

When the light dies down, there stands a young human man with dark skin and coiled hair, who looks to be in his thirties at most. He falls to his knees and vomits, a reaction Addy’s heard from many travelers is inevitable. 

Adexios looks down at his shaking hands and takes several deep breaths, trying to get them under control. He doesn’t require oxygen, but several of his components are affected by the passage of air, so it’s not a completely superfluous action. He’s just nervous, not breaking, the shaking is a byproduct of his emotional state, not his physical one. 

He’s most worried about losing his fine motor control in the long run. Once that happens, he’ll have to direct Ji-won to do the physical work for anything they have to make, and he’ll become even more useless.

He doesn’t have much time. He wishes he could go down there and help him, could hide this human in their ramshackle home and keep him safe, but that’s not something he’s capable of, not one his own. There was a reason they’d always done a job together. He places the tracker in the slingshot, aims for the human’s neck, takes one more deep breath, and lets it fly.

The tracker lands in his mass of curly hair, and Adexios slaps his hand over his face. He used to be much better at this, but at least the tracker will stick to hair too. He thinks. Hopefully.

The man doesn’t notice, still busy emptying his stomach of its contents. He wants to go over and help, he wishes he could rub a hand down his back and tell him that everything will be all right. But he can’t.

He hates that he’s breaking down. Hates that he’s alone, that Ji-won is so often off world, that Tara is in the middle of nowhere, that Roksana is - 

Well. He just misses people, is all. He was built to be around people, not rusting away on a trash heap planet. 

Which is why having no choice but to sit there are sleek white ships descend around him, and various people with the Agency’s logo stamped across their backs surround the man, is especially terrible. The pure white uniforms are as difficult to keep clean as they are uncomfortable to wear. 

He remembers that they were always especially itchy in the summer.

Two of the agents pull the traveler up and half carry half drag him into the closest ship while the other surrounding agents raise their taser gun into the air. They’re theoretically set to non lethal levels, but that’s a subjective term depending on the species. Tara could withstand a jolt that would kill the average human and barely feel a tingle. So if they set to non lethal levels for a Viatorum, that doesn’t mean much. 

Adexios would like to say they’re being paranoid, but they’re not. Real, original human travelers are worth a fortune, and poachers will do almost anything to claim one for their own. As will the Agency, clearly. No intergalactic court has ever convicted in favor of the victim in the case of a wrongful death in the course of picking up humans, as they like to call it. As if they’re just waiting on the side of the road for an ordered taxi, and haven’t been shoved a thousand years into the future, often against their will, depending the era they’re from. And this man is the very last human traveler. From here on out, they’ll have to make do with alien tainted decedents and cheap imitations.

They leave, their ships rising away from the earth and zooming into the atmosphere. It’s probably safe for Adexios to climb down from the tree and go home. Except if he does that, he can already tell his systems are going to overheat, and he’ll end up prostrate on the ground unable to move until he cools down.

There’s no need to make Ji-won any angrier than necessary. He’ll just wait. Hopefully, he’ll reach acceptable temperatures before Ji-won gets home, and he’ll be able to make his way back on his own without any sort of unnecessary dramatics about him taking too many risks. 

He’s used to taking much bigger risks than these, used to being on the run from half the universe’s planets and on the do not interact list for the other half, used to blazing through space on glory and laughter and the warm familiarity of being on ship with people who knew him and loved him because they knew him. 

Being on earth isn’t miserable. He’s not miserable. He has Ji-won, and he can’t be miserable when he’s with Ji-won. 

There’s all that time he spends not with Ji-won, however. 

~

“Miss Sassani,” says an old, rough voice. From the sound, he’s standing right in front of her, but it hurts too much to raise her head. “They are coming. They’ve retrieved the last human.” There’s a brief pause before he adds on, in case she couldn’t figure it out herself, “Your people failed.”

“Watch it,” she croaks, tilting her head back even with the white hot agony that it sends down her spine. The old man in a janitor’s uniform mopping in front of her cell looks almost entirely human, from his short grey hair to the wrinkles that settle naturally over his face. It’s the electric blue eyes that give him away. They’re almost glowing in the low light. “They can’t fail at an objective they didn’t have. I sent coordinates. Not instructions.”

“You wanted them to fail?” he asks. He’s not looking at her, so anyone watching them on the camera won’t notice anything odd.

She shrugs, unwilling to answer.

He sighs at her silence. “You know, if you were not so antagonist toward the Madame, she would not order such …creative interrogation methods.”

“If I give that bitch an inch, she’ll take a mile. She can take my silence from my corpse if it means so much to her,” she says, and doesn’t flinch when her smile splits her bottom lip open again. “Get out of here, Archi. Too much time spent talking to a prisoner can’t look good for you.”

He almost looks like he wants to say something. Instead he finishes mopping the place in front of her cell and says, almost too soft for her to hear. “Get some rest, Roksana.”

Roksana Sassani snorts and leans against the wall. She makes sure Archi is long gone before letting her eyes slide shut as she takes in slow, careful breathes in an attempt to not make her damaged rib cage even worse.

Her people don’t fail.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> this is now on the normal writing rotation with my other works :)
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	3. Chapter 3

The first thing Isaac is aware of is the pain.

Everything hurts all over, every single inch of him feels it’s being poked with needles, from the tip of his nose to the back of his knees and even the soles of his feet.

The pain at the base of his neck is different, and especially searing, He reaches up to feel if anything is bleeding or broken.

He _tries_ to reach up to feel if anything is bleeding or broken.

It doesn’t feel like he’s strapped down, he can’t feel anything touching him, but he can’t move his arms or legs. His heartbeat spikes and the fear has only just started to settle along his spine when someone with extremely large grey eyes leans over him. He opens his mouth to ask what’s going on, or at least to scream, but no sound comes out. The person above him smiles before touching something next to him.

He’s hit with a wave of drowsiness, so intense he’s forced to let his eyes slide shut.

Still, as he loses consciousness once more, he holds that person’s face in his mind and thinks, oh –

\- what sharp teeth you have, grandmother.

~

Adexios gets an alert when Ji-won’s ship enters the atmosphere. As much as he doesn’t want Ji-won to see him like this, having his partner come back to an empty home would be so much worse. He makes a last ditch effort to get down from the tree himself, but his gears grind against each other and he gets a temperature alert just from moving down to the next closest branch to the ground, so he gives in and sends him his coordinates along with a short message saying he could use a hand.

Less than a half hour later, Adexios can see Ji-won cutting through the field towards him.

He looks unfairly good in the light of the setting sun. A golden halo surrounds his short black hair, and it makes his skin looks warm, both the soft, tan human skin and the places where it blends to pebbly purple from his mother’s side in a neat swirling patterns. His clothes have seen better days, and it’s extra obvious now, looking down at him. He should really do something about that. It’s a good thing fabric is easy to manufacture, even if Ji-won is the only of them with any skill with a needle.

“What the hell are you doing up there?” Ji-won demands as soon as he’s close enough. “What if I hadn’t come back today? What if it had rained? You could have rusted!”

Adexios doesn’t roll his eyes only because he knows it will infuriate his partner. “All of my technological components are covered by three inches of waterproof synthetic skin. As you well know. I’m not going to rust.”

He crosses his arms, head craned back to look at him. “Addy. Why are you in a tree? Why did you waste your limited amount of energy to _climb_ a tree?”

“How about you help me down first, and then I’ll tell you?”

Ji-won sighs. Adexios had struggled to pull himself up the tree, worried about moving too fast and overheating himself even as he knew he had to get up there before the traveler came through. Ji-won doesn’t have that problem, and he has the added advantage of Pugnator strength on top of that. He doesn’t even use his legs or set his feet down, just uses his hands to pull his entire body weight up the tree until he reaches the branch Adexios is straddling, not even out of breath. “You have a leaf in your hair,” he says, running his hand through Adexios’s hair, presumably to get the leaf out, but he doesn’t miss the way his partner presses his fingers to place behind his ear, checking the temperature of his most vital component.

At the end of the day, he’s really no more than code. And that code is housed in a compartment at the back of his skull, and if his core temperature were to get too high, of if he damaged it some other way – well, without that code, he’s nothing.

“I’m fine,” he says softly, because as irritated he gets at Ji-won’s hovering, he knows it comes out of a place of worry. Of fear.

It’s funny, almost, in way that’s not funny at all. Compared to the lives they used to live, they’re so safe. Except now as his body breaks down, they’re in more danger of losing everything than they ever were before.

Ji-won growls, a soft, low sound that Adexios knows he wasn’t meant to hear. He readies himself for an argument, to have the same fight they’ve had a thousand times before. But instead Ji-won just sighs. He twists so he can pick Adexios up, an arm under the back of his knees and around his back. Adexios loops an arm around his neck to help steady himself, but he knows he doesn’t need to. Ji-won jumps from the branch and he barely feels it when Ji-won’s feet hit the ground. He starts walking, presumably back to his ship, and Adexios doesn’t waste his breath saying he could walk on his own. “Thank you.”

“Will you tell me what you were doing _now_?” he asks, plaintive, and this time Adexios does roll his eyes. “I wish you’d wait for me to be home before doing stuff like this. What if you overheat or your code glitches in the middle of the forest?”

Adexios ignores the last part. While getting into this familiar argument might buy him some time, he’s still going to have to tell Ji-won the truth in the end, and he’d rather he wasn’t in a bad mood from them arguing when he hears it. He considers a couple things that he could say to soften the blow, realizes there’s no way to soften this for him, and says, “Tara called.”

There’s a moment where every single one of Ji-won’s muscles tense up, then he forces himself to relax. “Oh?”

“She had the coordinates of the last human traveler.”

“No,” Ji-won snaps, shoulders pulling back. “How dare she-”

“I couldn’t do anything, obviously,” he interrupts, hoping he doesn’t sound as bitter as he feels. “But I put a tracker on him. I think she’s planning to go to after him.”

“Where did she get the coordinates?” he demands. “I thought she was pretending to be a no name mechanic in the middle of nowhere.”

To the sticking place, and all that. “Roksana.”

Ji-won slowly, carefully puts him back on his feet.

Adexios grabs onto his arm with both hands. “Don’t – look, don’t overreact.” He winces as soon as he says it.

“I’ll just be a couple minutes,” he says in that completely calm tone of voice that Adexios hates. He pries Adexios’s hands off of him, then goes walking towards the nearest tree.

His purple, pebbled skin shifts and grows to cover him, and he snaps his arm out against the trunk of the nearest tree. A twelve inch long pale white blade snaps out of his skin and slices through the trunk, then he does the same with his other arm. The thirty foot tree falls to the side with a dramatic crash that shakes the ground, but Ji-won has already moved on to the next one.

Adexios sits on the ground, rubbing his hand over his face before pulling his knees to his chest.

They don’t have secrets, but they do have silences. Roksana has been one that Adexios hasn’t been able to break through these past five years.

~

The first day, when she’s left alone in her cell, Roksana expects it. Obviously the director is busy. The second day is hardly surprising, really, and it’s nice to have more than a half dozen hours to heal before being subjected to Her Highness’s presence all over again.

By the time the third day rolls around, she’s starting to worry that she’s been replaced, that maybe she’s no longer the shiniest and most interesting thing in the space station.

She needn’t have worried.

In the middle of the night (for a given definition of night on a space station that doesn’t orbit any stars), she’s woken up by her two favorite security androids slamming her cell door open, grabbing her upper arms, and yanking her upright.

“Boys, boys,” she murmurs, blinking in the harsh light of the hall, “there’s no need to be so rough with me. It’s not my first time, but you could be gentle.”

“Be quiet, Prisoner,” they both state as one.

It doesn’t matter how many of them she meets, or how long she spends in their presence. Androids without free will or individuality or a sense of humor are just creepy. “You guys really don’t know how to show a girl a good time.”

Their grip on her arms tightens past the point of discomfort into pain, but she doesn’t say anything. They don’t have the capacity to care that they’re hurting her, after all. She doesn’t pull away, but she does squirm in their hands, flexing her arms against their grips just to make sure they have to readjust all over again.

She starts up a story about the time she had to rewire a hover bike blind, knowing they don’t actually care, but also knowing the more things she gives them to focus on – keeping her between them, her voice, her strange out of date human speech patterns – the less attention they have to give to her.

Computers are brilliant at multitasking. Humans are okay at it, depending on the person, as are most aliens.

Androids suck at it.

A person would probably notice the way her eyes flick across the hallway, taking in all the doors and signs in languages she’d be able to read even if she didn’t have a translator chip. Part of the reason they grab her with no warning when everyone is sleeping is so she’s tired and confused and not at her best. But it’s mostly because dragging her dirty and beaten form through their pristine hallways ruins their squeaky clean image.

They don’t want anyone to see her, so they grab her when everyone’s sleeping and bring her through the back hallways that no one else uses.

Idiots.

She’s been brought this way enough times that she knows all the doors, and ticks off the janitor’s closets as they pass by them. For an area that’s not very well trafficked, there sure are a lot of them.

Except they take another turn, and she hates herself for the eagerness and excitement that makes her stomach jump. This is pathetic. And even at her worst, she’s never pathetic.

But the gleaming white bathrooms with it’s industrial showers are so beautiful. It’s been months since she’s been able to do more than give herself a sponge bath, months since she’s felt truly clean. “You have five minutes,” the androids say as one.

She’s already stripping out of her clothes, dropping the ripped and dirty grey jumpsuit to the floor, uncaring of her nakedness as the androids continue staring at her. They can look all they want, it’s like showering in front of a bed lamp, and at this point she’d strip in front of the whole station if it meant getting to take a real shower. She makes the water just shy of being too hot to stand and reaches for the shampoo, soaking her long hair then squeezing what feels like half the bottle onto the top of her head. For a moment she mourns her long nails in a way she hasn’t since the last time she took a shower, wanting nothing more than scratch at her scalp, but makes do with blunt fingernails. There’s even conditioner, and she hurries to rinse the shampoo out so she has at least a couple of minutes to let the conditioner sit in her hair. She pours way more soap than she needs into the rough cloth and runs it all over body. When she passes over a cut or bruise it stings and pain flares up on her skin, but she doesn’t have the time to be gentle with herself. She’s just squeezing the last of the conditioner out of her hair when the water shuts off and the air starts, drying off her body and at least getting her hair from soaked to just damp.

“Get dressed,” the androids orders, and Roksana’s acidic comment dies on her tongue when she sees the clothes being held out to her.

It’s not just a clean version of the grey jumpsuit she’s been wearing for years.

Instead it’s white pants and a white shirt, the Agency’s logo stamped on the breast pocket, the same thing that the workers wear every day, the same as the androids have on right now.

“I’m not wearing that,” she snaps.

“There are no alternative garments,” they say.

She crosses her arms. “Then I’ll go naked.”

“Did you not promise to cooperate?” they ask. “This is not cooperating.”

Anyone stupid enough to believe she would cooperate against her own best interests gets what they deserve, as far as she’s concerned. But that’s androids, she supposes, so very smart and also very, very stupid. However, it is important for her to keep up the appearance of cooperation, even if anyone with a single brain cell, organic or otherwise, has figured out that she’s lied from the beginning.

She doesn’t have a middle name, but if she did, it would be Plausible Deniability.

“Fine,” she says shortly, and the new underwear and bra that actually fits is nice, but if anything it just makes her more suspicious. They haven’t bothered trying to dress her in something approaching real clothes in years, and changes to their lovely little routine are seldom in her favor.

She gets dressed, and it all fits her perfectly. They even give her shoes, white sandals that she can’t easily run in, and even though they’re flat they still feel strange on her feet after so long going barefoot.

They whisk her a couple hallways over, still not fast enough for her to catalogue where they are and what’s around them. The door to Thargelia’s office slides open and she’s pushed inside. She could catch herself, but doesn’t, letting herself fall to the ground and only making a half hearted effort to stop herself.

Thargelia doesn’t look up from her desk. “Are you planning to stay down there?”

“Well, your carpet is thicker than my mattress, so I don’t exactly have a lot of incentive to move,” she says, pushing herself to her feet. “I assume based on the face that we’re in your office and not the interrogation room that you won’t be going for physical torture this evening? I know you do so hate getting blood on your linen.”

“There are plenty of ways to hurt you that won’t make you bleed,” Thargelia says idly, turning off the padd she was reading and leaning back in her chair.

Roksana raises an eyebrow. “I’m hurt that you think I wouldn’t bite my tongue so I could spit blood in your face just to spite you.”

“Oh, Miss Sassani, I’m well aware of how far you’ll go in the name of spite,” she assures, and Roksana has to force herself not to stiffen, to keep her mocking smile in place. She’d meant what she said to Archi.

If she gave Thargelia an inch, she’d take a mile. So she has to do what she’d been doing for the past five years, which is give her nothing at all.

“You’re in a good mood,” she observes, slumping back in her chair. “Not that I mind.”

Something that might actually be a smile flits across Thargelia’s face before she smooths it back out, and a chill goes down Roksana’s spine. “We’ve picked up a new acquisition.”

“Oh?” she asks, and some part of her settles. She’s just gloating, and Roksana can handle her gloating. “Third generation or knock off?”

“Pure and original,” she says. “Straight from the source. A traveler.”

At least she doesn’t have to hide her anger. It’s what’s expected of her, after all. “How exciting for you. Have they asked about the locks on their room yet?”

“He hasn’t woken up yet,” she says, and Roksana’s eyebrows rise to her forehead. The acclimating shots can knock some people out, but usually only for a few hours. He’s at least been here for a couple days. “He had a bad reaction to the bio-organic chip, for some reason. We ended up having to use the synthetic blend.”

“You didn’t test for that? Not a mistake you’d usually make,” she says, burying her surprise that they’ve already progressed to surgery. Maybe there’s a high demand for this one, causing them to accelerate the process? It’s still strange. Loyalty to the agency is required before a placement can happen, and that’s not just not possible within a couple of days, even from the formerly rich travelers who paid billions to escape their time.

She shrugs, except the movement looks foreign and stilted on her, like her body just doesn’t know how to make a casual gesture. “Nothing to be done when I wasn’t there for it. There are risks when it’s done on transport.”

Roksana isn’t even aware of her body moving until she’s slamming her hands onto Thargelia’s desk. “You bitch! You chipped him on arrival? Was he even fucking conscious for it? I know he sure as hell didn’t ask for it, he couldn’t have even known what it was!”

Thargelia doesn’t react, and Roksana knows this isn’t a fight she can win, that even when she’s at her best Thargelia is faster and stronger than she is, and right now she’s far from her best. But all she wants to do is punch her right in the middle of her dead, too dark eyes. It would just end with her breaking a few fingers, but it would absolutely be worth it.

“It was a judgement call,” she says, and Roksana wants to strangle her. It wouldn’t even hurt her, but it would at least make her feel better. “It’ll be better for him, in the end. It’s not like he wouldn’t get it anyway.”

That’s not the _point_, and Thargelia damn well knows it. People getting shoved through time and space are confused and disoriented, and everything is different than when they remember it, not only is everyone they know gone, but so is their country, so is their whole planet. The only thing they have is their autonomy, is the ability to say no and have that mean something.

Taking that away is about the shittiest thing that anyone can do to them, from where she’s standing.

“Did you bring me here just to piss me off?” she asks, biting back so much of what she wants to say. If she starts she won’t stop, and she won’t give Thargelia the satisfaction of watching her lose control.

Her lips flatten as she presses them together, then she gets to her feet. “Of course not. But since you’ve been such a model detainee so far,” Roksana doesn’t laugh or snort or make any other sort of indication about how hilarious she finds that statement, “and it’s time you did more than rot away in the bowels of the space station.”

Bullshit. “Getting pressure from investors to rehabilitate me so I can be contracted out, then? How much am I going for these days? On one hand, I’m an interplanetary criminal, but hey, on the other hand, I’m an interplanetary criminal.”

“I’ve already informed them your bond isn’t for hire,” she says, her voice that certain cadence that only comes out when she’s pissed off, and at least this visit hasn’t been a complete waste. “But some rather large names are quite insistent I’m seen making an effort to change that, in spite of a rather large volume of evidence that you’re erratic, untrustworthy, selfish, and a danger to yourself and others.”

“Stop, I’ll blush,” she says. “This is why the new clothes, then? I don’t make a good peace offering if I’m filthy and bleeding.”

“I’d rather keep you bleeding until you break,” she snaps, some of the viciousness she tries so hard to hide coming to the surface. “You promised me the locations of all the humans you’d stolen, and yet we haven’t even recovered _one_!”

She doesn’t know why Thargelia’s fury tastes so sweet. Probably because she’s nursing some sort of repressed death wish. “I can only give you their last known location. It’s not my fault they moved, I’m really trying the best that I can.”

“Don’t,” she warns, eyes narrowed. “This little act of yours isn’t fooling me, even if it’s fooling them. They want to see me trying to rehabilitate you, fine, we can parade you out for them to see. But don’t think for a second that I don’t know you’re up to something, that this is all just – some sort of game to you.”

“Why would you say that?” she asks, taken aback. She’s not wrong, but Roksana’s still surprised to hear it.

“Because you never do anything that doesn’t benefit you,” she sneers, “and so far turning yourself in hasn’t gotten you anything.”

She bites back a smile. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I haven’t had to pay a gas bill in five years.”

~

Tara isn’t surprised, exactly, that Ji-won and Addy chose to hide away on earth. For one, it’s an abandoned planet, one that’s overgrown and overrun where its habitable at all, so it’s nowhere that anyone would be looking for them.

But really, it’s just because they like living there, like being able to claim something in common with the travelers. Likes having something to claim.

Tara isn’t like that. Her species is homeless, eternal vagabonds looking to replace the planet they lost generations ago and documenting that search across their skin. Viatorums are without a home, but not without a people, a history, a culture. All across the universe her people exist, there’s almost nowhere in the universe she can go and not find someone speaking her mother tongue. She’s always known who she is, and it used to be that the vastness of space frightened her, that she couldn’t imagine letting go of her father’s skirts and going tumbling into the great unknown all on her own.

Which, granted, she never did.

She had Roksana, then Addy, then Ji-won. She’s never been alone.

Well, not until five years ago, at least.

But she doesn’t yearn for an identity, because she has one, she’s a Viatorum. Her loneliness is personal, not cultural.

Addy doesn’t have that. He and his kind were made to be human replacements, were made as human as they could be, and from what she’s seen, they succeeded. But now he’s the second to last of his kind, even rarer than the humans he was intended to replace, and there’s no solace in that, no community in that.

Ji-won is different. His great grandparents were travelers, but his grandmother fell in love with a Tilethiko, moved to zir planet, and had a son. Who’d somehow ended up on the war torn planet of Nator and gotten himself a war bride. Ji-won is only a quarter human, and for all he could almost pass for one, the Pugnator is too strong. The neat, sanitized Tilethiko would never accept a half Pugnator citizen as their own, and Ji-won hates his mother’s blood and her kind with a ferocity born of her people, and maybe it would be ironic if it wasn’t so sad. With very little to reach for, he clung to what hadn’t outright rejected him, or vice versa. His human side.

It hurts her whenever she thinks of it, of them. It’s not just that Roksana’s grief is more familiar to her, it’s that it’s cleaner, more straightforward. Roksana had a life and a family and a future, and she lost all of it. She mourns her past, mourns losing something real and tangible, not an identity and not what she never had.

So, all in all, it doesn’t surprise Tara that they decided to hide themselves away on earth.

She just doesn’t understand why they chose here, of all places.

There are a few perfectly lovely abandoned cities with great towering structures that are still solid after all these years, are still places that people can live in. Or they could have at least moved to the beach. Instead they’re in the middle of a forest in a sagging structure that was probably a military base a few hundred years ago, considering it’s still standing, but right now kind of just looks like a very sad hill.

The clearing is big enough for her to land in, at least.

She’s just stepping out of her ship when Ji-won comes storming out of the house. The sun highlights the purple swirls in his skin and how his black hair almost looks blue in the setting sun.

“Have you lost your mind?” he shouts. “No! Wasn’t dragging Addy into this bad enough? Leave!”

“Your muscles are huge,” she tells him, “hauling around criminals is a good look on you. Also, I can’t really drag Addy anywhere. He’s too heavy for that.”

His eyes narrow, and he takes in a deep breath so he can keep yelling at her, but she tunes the rest of it out, suddenly not interested. Adexios is leaning against the doorframe to their home, his arms crossed and wearing a sweater that judging by the size has to be Ji-won’s.

He looks like shit. He’s holding himself like it hurts him to stand, and his head is tipped against the door as if holding it up exhausts him. So much of what’s going wrong with him is internal, is gears and code and frayed wires, but it’s obvious just looking at him too, all the ways in which his internal systems must be failing him.

“See?” Ji-won says quietly, and the change of tone is enough to pull her attention back to him. “You can’t drag him into this. Not again. He can’t handle it.”

She ignores the concern churning in the pit of her stomach. “He’s like four times your age, I’m pretty sure he can make his own decisions. And I didn’t drag him into this last time.” That was all Roksana, of course. Tara does her best work as an accomplice rather than an instigator.

He doesn’t respond to that, instead asking, “Can you do anything for him?”

“If I could, don’t you think I would have?” she snaps. “I knew him first, remember. I’ve known him most of my life. I’ve done everything I could, and fuck you for implying otherwise.”

Ji-won raises his hand, backing down from her anger like he always does. He’s good at that, at pressing without leaving bruises. “Sorry. I know. But you can’t seriously be considering doing this again.”

Before she can answer, Addy calls out, “Are you two going to stand there talking about me all day, or are you going to come inside?”

Tara grins while Ji-won sighs, and she’s missed this, missed them. “Just give her the tracker information so she can leave,” Ji-won says, walking back to his partner while she follows a half step behind.

Tara pokes him in the shoulder, hard enough to bruise if his skin wasn’t so tough. He squirms away from her, and she’d forgotten how ticklish he is. She has to stop herself from reaching out to do it again, because it will almost certainly undermine the seriousness of their upcoming conversation. “About that.”

“No,” Ji-won repeats, his earlier friendliness retreating.

Addy’s smiling, and Tara bends down to hug him, careful not to hold him too tightly to keep from breaking something that she can’t repair. “You cut your hair,” he says.

“Well, I don’t have anyone to braid it for me anymore,” she says, and doesn’t miss the way his grip tightens on her for a second before relaxing.

He pulls away and reaches up to run his hand through it. “So, you’re not really planning to sneak into the Agency’s space station with that hunk of metal, are you? It may look nice, but I bet it doesn’t even have shielding.”

She doesn’t glance back at her stolen ship. “Of course not. Why would I do that when Boomerang is so much more suited to the task?”

Ji-won scowls. “Our ship got destroyed thanks to,” he pauses, and Tara’s eyebrows push together. This is going to be a hard sell if he can’t even bring himself to say her name. “It’s gone.”

“Is it?” she asks. “Strange.”

Addy pinches her side, and she takes a step away from him scowling. “You brat. You fixed it?”

Actually, it wasn’t even that badly broken, but she’s not going to tell them that. Not until they retrieve this traveler at least. “Yes. It’s waiting for us.”

“There’s no us,” Ji-won says. “We’re not doing this.”

Tara opens her mouth, undecided if she’s going to try teasing him or just dive straight into an argument, but Addy cuts her off. “I’ll come.”

“What?” Ji-won doesn’t even sound mad, just shocked.

“I’ll come,” he repeats. “I know Boomerang’s systems, I know you, I know the Agency. I’m coming.”

Tara really hadn’t expected it to be that easy. She has to resist the urge to hug him again. Once was enough, and she as a reputation. Ji-won is the one with the soft underbelly, not her.

“Absolutely not!” he shouts. “You – it’ll kill you!”

Addy shrugs, and that one gesture is enough to make Tara question everything. “Then I die doing what I love. If you want to keep me safe, then come with me. It’ll be bad enough that Boomerang is without her captain. You’re a pilot, love. Be a pilot. Fly her to the Agency and we can take back what they’ve stolen. We’ve done it before. Let’s do it again.”

For a moment, Tara thinks that it really will be that easy.

Ji-won shakes his head. His face is contorted like he’s in pain when he says, “No. It’s not even that we shouldn’t, or that I don’t want to. We _can’t_, not the three of us. Not on our own. Not without Roksana. She was always the planner, the one who pulled this crap off. We can’t do it without her.”

Addy’s eyes widen, confirming all of Tara’s suspicions about Ji-won’s feelings surrounding their former captain.

“Actually,” she says, bracing herself, “this _is_ her plan.”

There’s a moment of absolute, perfect stillness.

Then they both start yelling at her, and, well, it was nice while it lasted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	4. Chapter 4

They move Roksana from the cell that’s been her home for the past five years to a room with a real actual bed and a dresser. It even has a mirror.

The first thing she does is take it all apart.

She strips the bed and checks under the mattress, pressing every inch of the thick foam together with her hands. Next come out all the drawers in the room, then everything hanging on the wall. She can’t pry the mirror off, so she takes her top sheet to cover it just to make a point, before putting everything back in place.

She doesn’t bother to remove or alter any of the listening devices or cameras she finds. There’s no point, since they’d replace them anyway, and besides, it’s not like she’s stupid enough to say or do anything incriminating just because she’s been given the illusion of privacy. She’s not an idiot.

After years of sleeping on the cold hard floor, she would have thought she would have relished sleeping in a real bed again, but she can’t get comfortable. What she really wants to do is drag her thick comforter and soft pillow to the floor, but she knows she’s being watched, and Thargelia will never let her forget showing that kind of weakness, so she doesn’t.

Somehow, this is more unbearable than the years of straight up torture, and the worst thing she could do is let Thargelia know that.

~

Tara doesn’t tell them everything, but she doesn’t feel that bad about it. When this is over, she’ll come clean, and they can weigh her sins against her circumstances, and if they find her wanting then so be it. But she has to tell them something, has to tell them enough to get them to come with her.

“Roksana told you that she was going to send you coordinates?” Ji-won demands. “Before she turned herself in?”

“You knew she was going to turn herself in?” Addy follows it up with.

There are so many wrong answers to those questions, and not that many right ones. There’s also the truth, but she’ll only bust that out if she really has to. Or if it’ll get her what she wants. “Yes, and yes. She told me the Agency was coming for her an hour before they arrived, and she told me that I should always keep a transmitter broadcasting.” Some of the truth, then, just not all of it. A slight misrepresentation of the timeline is barely even a lie at all.

“And you listened to her?” Ji-won scoffs, “She could have used that to send the Agency after you! We were lucky they didn’t catch all of us when they came for her.”

“Were we?” Addy asks, and he doesn’t sound that surprised. If either of them is going to figure it out, is going to be able to call her on her bullshit, it’s Addy. He’s known her and Roksana since they were kids. “Or was us getting abandoned on a beta planet part of this little plan? That seems a little bit less like luck and more like premeditation.”

“No,” Ji-won says with such flat, firm conviction that Tara knows that this isn’t the first time they’ve had this conversation, this is just the first time she’s here to witness it. So the only one Roksana had really fooled had been Ji-won, which isn’t that surprising, and says more about Ji-won than it does her. He’s always so eager to see the worst in people, even the ones he cares about, that being betrayed was probably a relief, in a way.

It’s a depressing trait, but one that Roksana had been depending on. Ji-won has a terrible poker face, and is loyal to a fault. If he hadn’t thought Roksana had betrayed them, had turned on them, he never would have let her go, and they just couldn’t have that.

Addy raises an eyebrow and turns to Tara. She chews on her bottom lip, trying to stall enough to give her time to figure out the perfect thing to say, but even that hesitation is too much. She may know Ji-won, but he knows her equally well. “Why would you do that? Why would she do that?”

“Just because she was willing to turn herself in, doesn’t mean she was going to do that to rest of us,” Tara answers, and that’s the truth, minus one tiny detail. Lying without lying is a human trick, and Roksana taught it to her when the were kids, was one of the first things she learned from the strange human girl who’d come out of nowhere. “She wanted to get information from the inside that we couldn’t get from the outside. And now she has, and she wants us to save this human. The very last human that will have come from a different time, to know and remember the earth as she knew it, as your great grandparents knew it. So are we going to do what she wants, or not?”

Ji-won doesn’t say anything, lips pressed into a thin line, and he’s stubborn, he’s so stubborn, and it’s an admirable quality except when it gets in her way.

“I’m in,” Addy says, and Ji-won switches to glaring at his boyfriend. “What? I’ve spent decades doing dumb things just because Roksana wanted me to. Old habits are hard to break. I’m going.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says, but Tara bites back a grin, because she knows that this battle is already lost, and she’s pretty sure she’s won.

Addy nods. “Okay. I understand. But you’re my partner, not my keeper, and I’m going with Tara to go fly our ship and to get into some sort of mess of our captain’s design, and if you don’t want to go then you don’t have to. But that’s where I’ll be.”

“She’s not even our captain anymore,” he complains, shoulders slumping, and Tara makes a note to give Addy a high five the next time they’re alone together. “Fine.”

Addy glances at her, and doesn’t wink because Ji-won is literally right there, but she picks up the sentiment anyway.

~

Thargelia has advanced emotional regulation programming, but she can’t help the spike of annoyance when Roksana systematically dismantles the room and finds every spying device they’d hidden, even the ones it’s impossible for her to see or feel, because she knows where the best places to keep them are, so she assumes they’re there, and she’s right.

She thinks she might hate her a little less if she wasn’t so smart. She could make a fortune off Roksana if she could be trusted, and it galls her that she can’t be, that she’s a liability rather than an asset, and she doesn’t know how to change that. It’s too bad that there are so many high profile people invested in Roksana, otherwise she could just quietly kill her and save herself the trouble.

“Ma’am,” says a cool polite voice from the intercom on her desk, “the traveler is awakening.”

“I’ll be down in a moment,” she says, getting to her feet and smoothing her skirt to her knees before bending down and slipping her feet back into her heels. Just because she can turn off her pain sensors in her feet doesn’t make wearing these comfortable. She pauses, then says, “Bring Sassani as well.”

There’s a half second of silence, then, “Of course.”

~

Roksana has a lot of ideas about what they’ll do to give the image of reforming her while making her as miserable as possible, since Thargelia unfortunately isn’t stupid enough to believe that she can be reformed. Some sort of sewage work, maybe, except she’s never had any problem with getting her hands dirty. Dealing with small children, possibly, except there aren’t that many on board. Perhaps they’ll force her to record public safety videos. She’d honestly prefer the sewage work.

So when her two favorite androids – or possibly two completely different ones because she could not tell them apart to save her life – arrive at her room to escort her somewhere else, in the middle of the day when anyone could see her, she’s wary, understandably so, she thinks, because as previously established, changes in her routine rarely bode well for her.

She’s escorted to the medical wing, and for the first time she’s actually nervous. What could they want her for here? Dissecting humans is such a waste, and most galactic governments have the policy that no matter how many human body parts an alien gets transplanted into them, they still don’t qualify for a species change, so that’s not really done anymore. Hopefully.

“Miss Sassani,” Thargelia greets, makeup and hair and clothes flawless. If they’d wanted androids to have the true human experience, they should have all been made with the ability to get pimples.

She peeks around, but the place looks surprisingly empty. Not a good a sign. For her, anyway. “So, am I supposed to wash out bedpans or what?”

Thargelia doesn’t sigh, but Roksana likes to think that she wants to. “I’ve decided that you’re to be the guide for our newest guest, since you’re so familiar with how our time and customs differ from yours.”

That’s a terrible idea.

Roksana considers keeping that thought to herself, but it’s not like that’s ever been her strong suit. “That’s a terrible idea.”

Thargelia smiles. It’s a genuinely disturbing look. It’s not that she doesn’t look human, it’s not some sort of uncanny valley or anything like that, it’s just that things that make Thargelia happy are generally terrible.

Well, sometimes looking at her is kind of uncomfortable, but only because there are times when she leans into being an android, and tries to act less human than she is, as if her humanity isn’t her greatest asset.

“Yes,” she says, and Roksana raises an eyebrow. “I’m certain you’ll be unable to resist telling him how terrible we all are and how much you hate us, and when you fail I’ll be able to hold it up as evidence of how you’re impossible to reform and that you cause more trouble than your worth, and then I’ll finally be rid of you.”

Okay, honestly? Solid plan. But. “Isn’t telling me this a bit of a strategic misstep?”

“This task is the carrying a frog across a river, and you’re a scorpion, Miss Sassani,” she answers. “I don’t think telling you will make any difference at all. You can’t help your nature.”

There’s a compliment somewhere in there, she’s sure of it, but she just settles for scowling instead of responding. She’s managed five years without giving in an inch, and Thargelia thinks that the temptation to shit talk will be the thing that will fuck her up?

It’s be in character, for sure, but she’s come too far to mess it all up now, no matter how much she’d love to fill in this new traveler on how he’s landed himself right in the middle of a nightmare. But there’s no compelling reason to do that, given the circumstances. “Thanks.”

Thargelia turns and walks towards a bed in the corner of the medical wing, the click clacking of her heels against the floor the only sound in the room, and Roksana followers her out of a lack of anything else to do. Thargelia dramatically pulls the curtain back. “Meet the last traveler, Miss Sassani. He should be waking up in the few minutes.”

Oh, shit.

She drags her eyes over him, his dark skin and curly hair, and this is impossible. Well, not impossible, but improbable, and real bad run of luck for her, personally. “What did you say his name was?’

“His data packet wasn’t attached, so he must not have been a paying customer,” she answers, and then her eyes narrow. “Do you know him?”

Roksana turns away from the man on the bed to roll her eyes at Thargelia and put her hands on her hips. “Yeah, I met every other prisoner that was ever passed through and we sat down and had tea together, in between experiments and with me not knowing anyone’s language, it was a real hoot.”

Thargelia sighs, but whatever she had to say to that is cut off with a groan, the man in the bed raising a hand to his head and rubbing at his temples, then reaching for his neck and hissing in pain.

Roksana grabs his wrists, pulling them away before he hurts himself. “Stop, don’t mess with it.” Modern medicine has advanced to the point where people healing the old fashioned way is almost unheard of, but if he had a bad reaction the organic chip they probably didn’t want to risk his body rejecting anything else by introducing more substances into his body.

“Where am I?” he asks, eyes glassy and unfocused. It takes him several moments to drag his eyes up from her hands around his to her face. “Who are you?”

“Roxy,” she answers. because any other answer would be too much, would give too much away, and she can’t have that, not when everything is so close. “What’s your name?”

He glances around him and then focuses on her, staring at her so intently that she hopes it’s just because she’s the only thing in the room that looks familiar to him who isn’t a bitchy android, not that he knows that part yet. And she won’t even be able to tell him either, which is just great. “Isaac. Where are we?”

“When are we,” she corrects, because it’s her absolute favorite thing to say to people, and she so rarely gets to be the one doing this. They’d been better at moving people once they got far enough out of the Agency’s constantly watching eyes than collecting them before the Agency got to them, although they’d managed it a few times.

“When,” he repeats, looking around the room again, but more slowly this time, taking in the things he’d skipped over before, probably cataloging all ways this room is different from any other medical facility he’s been in. “My father was right, I should have been a theoretical physicist.”

There’s no reason not to, so Roksana throws back her head and laughs.

It helps distract her from the fact that circumstances have most certainly changed.

~

Adexios has knowm Tara since she was a shy, curious girl who would follow Roksana anywhere, and he loves her whole heartedly.

But clearly she goes a bit off kilter when left on her own for too long.

“Merry?” he repeats, just in case he’s misheard. “You left our ship with Merry?”

She crosses her arms over her chest. She’s sitting in the back of her stolen ship with him, since Ji-won had refused to ride as a passenger while she piloted.

“How many ship smugglers owe us favors?” she asks. Ji-won opens his mouth. “How many ship smugglers over us favors who wouldn’t double cross us at the slightest hit of an opportunity?” Ji-won closes his mouth. “Merry’s a good guy.”

“Guy is subjective, as is good,” Adexios says. “We had to buy human cargo off them when we met them in order to get the humans back.”

“Well, they sold them to us at market value and I think that was real decent of them,” Tara says, leaning forward. “Are you planning to fly like this the whole way there? I did put radiated coils in, we don’t actually have to go tourism speeds.”

Ji-won reaches behind him and pushes Tara back into her seat. “I don’t remember you being such a backseat driver.”

“I don’t remember you driving like my grandma,” she complains.

Adexios frowns. “Your grandmother rigged her ship to break speed barrier rules seven times.”

“No, she got caught seven times, there’s a difference,” she says.

Ji-won sighs. “Exactly. Do you want to get tracked for flying a tourism vessel above its zoned speeds? I don’t. It’s stolen, for one, and even without our captain, I think a Viatorum, an android, and a Pugnator Human hybrid traveling together might ring a few bells for some of the law enforcement.”

Tara’s eyes narrow, but she doesn’t argue, slumping back into her seat. “It’s too bad Colonel Lionel retired, he was always so useful at helping us avoid things like that.”

“That guy was an asshole,” he snaps.

Adexios shares a look with Tara. He’s not in the mood to push his luck with his boyfriend more than he already has, but Tara has no such restraint. “You just didn’t like him because he always flirted with Addy.”

There’s a cracking sound, and he leans forward to poke Ji-won in the side. “Hey, easy! This is a commercial ship, it’s not built to withstand you.”

“Sorry,” he says, forcing himself to relax, and then changing the subject, “Are you sure Merry still has the ship? What if they sold it for fair market value?”

“They wouldn’t,” Tara says with such firm conviction.

Adexios is instantly nervous. “How do you know?”

She glances at him, then goes back to staring out the front of the ship, which does absolutely nothing to aid his nervousness. “Because while they’ve been keeping Boomerang for me, I’ve been keeping something for them.”

There’s a long moment of silence.

Neither he nor Ji-won want to be the one to ask, but one of them has to, and of the two, he’s the one not currently flying the ship. “Please tell me you didn’t steal their black book and that you haven’t been holding it as ransom in exchange for watching over our ship.”

She shifts in her seat. “You know, I think it’s possible we’ve known each other too long.”

“Tara!” Ji-won shouts while Adexios leans forward to put his head in his hands. “Are you insane?”

“Look, you said it yourself, we had to pay them to release the slaves they were transporting, good guy like being or not, they’re hardly a being of upstanding moral character,” she says.

Merry’s black book is a list of every back alley deal they’ve conducted over the past thirty years, and they keep it under several layers of top notch security, and Tara is fantastic, but there’s no way she could get past it alone. Which means she and Roksana have been planning all this for a lot longer than just the hour’s heads up that Tara said Roksana gave her.

If this particular revelation hasn’t occurred to Ji-won, he’s not going to be the one to bring it up.

“They're going to kill us,” Ji-won says, “you know that, right?”

Tara leans forward to clap him on the shoulder. “You wouldn’t let that happen to us, would you?’

“I wouldn’t let that happen to Addy,” he says, “you’re on your own.”

Adexios rolls his eyes. That would never happen.

“I’ll just hide behind him then,” she says.

There’s a whole lot of empty space in front of them, and they are only going tourist speeds, so it’s not like Ji-won has to be paying especially close attention while driving. But the way he twists his whole body in his seat to glare at Tara is a bit much. “You wouldn’t even help me? Tara!”

“Viatorum are a pacifistic species, you know, everyone says that,” she demurs.

He snorts. “If everyone includes only people who have never met a Viatorum, then sure.”

Actually, they’ve come across more pacifistic Viatorum than not, and it sounds like Tara was well on her way to becoming one of them. Before she met Roksana. “Honey, you’re piloting.”

Ji-won shifts back so he’s facing the wide empty pace.

“How come you never listen to me like that?” Tara complains, leaning back and placing her feet on the center console, because she knows that Ji-won hates that.

Sure enough, he grabs her ankles and shoves her feet back behind him, and Tara’s laughter fills the tiny ship, makes it feel bigger than it is.

~

Isaac spends the first week in denial.

He won’t eat the unfamiliar foods, won’t look at the strange people that seem nothing close to human, refuses to look out the window so he isn’t confronted by the endless blackness of space stretching out in front of him. This can’t be real. It can’t be happening. 

He’d really wanted to get tenure, one day. 

The woman with bright blue eyes who’s perfectly polished, from her expertly styled hair to her sky high leather pumps, keeps trying to talk to him, is smiling and kind and persistent in getting him to believe her, to understand her, to accept that this is his life now. She tells him that her name is Thargelia, but he can’t bring himself to call her anything but Ma’am. 

Roxy doesn’t bother. She’s brought to him every day, escorted by two things that look like people, almost, except for all the ways it’s obvious that they’re not. The part of him that’s a professor is fascinated, wants to know everything, how they work and what their coding is, but he can’t ask. If he accepts part of this, he has to accept all of it, and he doesn’t want to. 

That’s why he likes Roxy. 

She’s not polished, long hair falling around her, wearing the same white clothes that everyone seems to wear, except she somehow makes them look rumpled and sloppy, which he’s not sure how she manages since they fit her just fine. She doesn’t say anything, just sits on the bed next to his, leaning back against the wall with her arm resting on her bent knee, staring at nothing. If he asks her a question, she answers, smiling and friendly, but is never the one to initiate contact. 

He’d adopted a stray cat like that, once. He’s annoyed to realize that it’s working on him anyway. 

“Theoretically,” he always starts, because none of this is real, it has to be the most elaborate prank ever constructed, “are you an alien?” 

“Theoretically,” she always answers, clearly humoring him, and he hates how much he likes her for that, “I’m just as human as you are. But we’re the aliens here, by the way.” 

That’s a strange thought. 

Sometimes he doesn’t speak at all, trying to match her silence, but the more days pass, the more curious he becomes, the more inevitable this all seems. “Were you born here?” 

“I’m a traveler, just like,” she pauses, “like some of the humans who are still around. Most of us are hybrids, at least a few generations removed. There aren’t many people left who remember the Earth.” 

She’s been about to say like you, a traveler just like you, and then she’d stopped herself. “Is Thargelia a traveler?” 

Roxy laughs, but he doesn’t know why, doesn’t get the joke. “No. She’s not a traveler.” 

He raises a hand to his neck, pressing cautious fingertips against his newly healed skin to feel the microchip underneath. “Does everyone have one of these?” 

She pulls her hair back, and she has a thick scar across her neck. It looks nothing like his. It looks like it hurt. “Of a sort. Mine’s not exactly like yours, but they all have the basics. The automatic translator, the biometric reader, the tracker. It can even generate a wifi signal in a pinch.” 

“Why is yours,” he starts and then doesn’t know how to finish, but the only way he can think to end that sentence is ugly, and he doesn’t want to do that. 

She smiles. “I had to get the one I was given taken out.” 

_What? _

“They said it couldn’t be taken out!” he shouts, betrayal and hope warming his chest. “I want it off Out! Whatever!” 

“No,” she says, but it’s not cruel or mean. It’s sad. “No, I don’t think you should do that. It’s not meant to come out. Ever. You could die.” 

“Then what happened to you?” he challenges. 

She curls forward, resting her chin on her knee, and he nearly takes it back. “Mine had some faulty programming, and I was told that it could be fixed remotely, that the coding could be altered without having to remove it. But I didn’t trust it, so I had them remove it. I had a very good doctor,” she says, and she’s smiling a way that makes it clear that she’s not telling him anything close to the whole story. “It was all for nothing, of course. They were right. There was nothing in hardware that would have hurt me, and now I have this lovely scar.” 

“But it was your choice,” he says, because that’s important.

“Yes,” she says, “it was.” 

In those first few days, when everything is terrible and all he can do is think of the father and friends and students and life that is now long gone, that now only exists the pages of history, Roxy only loses her temper once. 

Thargelia is insistent, and so close, too close, saying something about taking some sort of test, but he just can’t deal with that right now. 

“Oh, shut up and go find a puppy to kick,” Roxy snaps, and he looks up and he can’t see Thargelia anymore, just the back of Roxy’s head, because she’s standing between him and her, “He obviously wasn’t chartered, he was an experiment, so back off. This is fucking terrifying for him, you bitch. I know you’re eager to contract him out because I’m sure he’s fetching a nice juicy price, but if he has a mental breakdown on the job that’ll look a whole lot worse for you than if you just give him some damn _time_.” 

There’s a long moment of silence, and for some reason Isaac is terrified, even though he has no reason to be, even though nobody here has ever shown any hints of violence, but he’s so sure that there’s about to be a fight. 

Instead Thargelia takes a deep breath, says, “That’s the most valuable thing you’ve said to me in years,” and leaves the room. 

“Thank you,” he says, in the quiet, now that it’s just him and Roxy and the two robots that are always following her around. 

She looks over her shoulder and smiles at him. “Anytime.”

It can’t last, of course it can’t, and Roxy wins. As he’s sure she knew she would. He can’t be in denial forever, no matter how much he’d like to.

“Okay,” he says when Roxy walks in, “I’ve traveled forward in time. The earth is inhabitable. Humans experienced an extinction level event of our own making, and now the only ones left are the ones who were sent through time. Most people payed for the privilege, but I – I was stolen.”

“Yes,” she says calmly.

“I can’t go home,” he continues, voice getting caught in his throat, and he has to swallow before he can continue. “It can only send people forward. So I’m stuck here. In the future, in this place. The Agency.”

“Yes,” she repeats, equally calm as before, somehow sadder in way he can’t pinpoint.

He looks at her, her steady gaze and the softness in the corner of her mouth. “What happens now?”

She doesn’t answer for a long time, just looking at him, and he’s not sure what for, if she’s searching for something inside him of if she’s just thinking, but eventually she says, “Now you get to work.”

~

Ji-won forgot how easy this all was. He’s neither seen nor spoken to Tara in half a decade, and it’s like she never left. At the beginning she’s been colder, had acted towards them almost like she used to act towards outsiders. But it hadn’t lasted, by the time they’d gotten into the ship it was like old times.

Well. Almost like old times.

He and Addy have had more arguments about Roksana and around Roksana than anything else, including his deteriorating code. But she tried to turn them in, except maybe it’s looking like she didn’t, but even if it’s true, if this was all some long con of her, or one of her ridiculous plans, it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t change the most important thing.

She left.

She was their captain, their friend, and she’d left them, cast them on the wind with nothing to cling to. He’d had Addy, and Addy had had him, but they’d had to strip themselves of their names and their identities, had to hide in the middle of nowhere while Tara retreated to some cold corner of the galaxy to pass the years being a two bit mechanic, where she cut her hair.

Maybe, out of everything, that’s the most surprising thing, the severe bob cut to just below chin.

When he’d seen her last, it had been down past her waist, pure white against her navy skin. She never wore it loose, always pinning and braiding it, to keep it out of her face and out of her way as she worked. But she’d never put it up herself, not for over thirty years, not since she’d met Roksana, and their captain had done it for her.

But Roksana is gone, and so Tara has cut her beloved hair, and doesn’t that just say it all.

She left them, and it doesn’t matter if she hadn’t wanted to hurt them, because she did, because her betrayal was in leaving, and so his rage burns just as hot. He tempers it, shoves it down and leaves it for a later day. He’s here for Addy, and maybe a little for Tara even if he won’t admit it. His anger at Roksana has no place here.

Not yet, anyway.

~

It takes them way longer than it should to get to Merry’s piece of the universe, to the asteroid belt that’s surrounds their planet. It’s made up of junk, actually, not asteroids, things Merry couldn’t sell and pieces of ships they couldn’t repair.

“You can fly us through that in this, right?” she asks. She can’t wait to get back to their ship, to take a hot shower and sleep in a bed. This ship was built for one Mitger, maybe two if they’re real friendly, but certainly not three human sized beings, and after the long trip here, she has a crick in her neck that she’s certain will never go away.

Ji-won manually turns off the safety controls and Addy straps himself into his seat. “This would have been a lot easier if you could have stolen a ship with some proper shielding.”

She opens her mouth to answer, but then she’s flying backward as Ji-won pushes the ship as fast as it’ll go, hurtling towards the dense layer of sharp, dangerous floating objects that are between them and Merry. She screams and curses him out, but all Ji-won does is laugh, eyes bright, and she can’t possibly stay mad at that.

Well, at least until their first collision, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it! 
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastroyteller.tumblr.com


	5. Chapter 5

Isaac knows over two dozen programming languages, and how to use them in three different systems, so there’s absolutely no reason for this to be so hard for him. 

“Relax,” Roxy says, voice low and amused and right next to his ear. He resists the urge to flinch. He hadn’t known that she was right there. “You’re overthinking this. It’s not that hard. You know what you’re doing, you just need to get comfortable doing it in a different way.” 

“Why don’t you do it then?” he snaps. The guilt is immediate. Roxy hasn’t done anything but help him, even at times to her own detriment, and she doesn’t deserve to the target of his frustrations. It’s not her fault that he’s bad at this.

She doesn’t seem upset or surprised, but she does lean over him, her chest pressed against his back and the scent of her hair in his nose. He’s so distracted by it that he almost misses her typing in a string of code and initiating the simulation. Unlike all of his previous attempts, this time it’s executed perfectly. “If you insist,” she murmurs. 

He spins his chair to face her. “How did you know how to do that?” 

“I know everything,” she answers, straight faced. 

“Then what do they want me for?”

Isaac doesn’t know what his face looks like right now, but whatever it is makes her crack a grin. “You’re less trouble than I am, which, granted isn’t a particularly high bar to pass. Besides, once you get the hang of this you’ll be loads better than I am. I’m not an expert by any estimation, I just know enough about everything to get into trouble, and not enough of it to get myself out of it.” 

“Is that why you’re here?” he asks, because he’s not an idiot. Her android escorts are to keep an eye on her, and not because she doesn’t know the way to his quarters. He’s not exactly sure who she is or what her circumstances are, but it’s clear that it’s not exactly voluntary. It took him a while to focus on something else besides himself, his own loss, and now that he’s accepted where and when he is, he’s just working so he doesn’t dwell on his circumstances. He just knows there’s some sort of dramatic mental breakdown waiting for him in his future.

She smiles, something warm and small and somehow more real than any expression he’s seen from her yet. “Something like that.” 

“How do you get yourself out of trouble, then?” he asks, not sure what he’s asking, exactly, but knowing that he wants to keep that look on her face. 

“Oh, I don’t,” she says, and now her smile is curling into a smirk. “I’ve always just waited for people much smarter than me to get me out of it. It has a wonderful successful rate.” 

There’s some sort of joke he’s not in on, but with Roxy smiling at him, he can’t really bring himself to care. 

~

Tara would be more impressed with Ji-won’s piloting skills if she wasn’t bored out of her mind. 

“Can’t you go any faster?” she asks, yawning. Addy can forgo sleep, seeing as he’s an android, and Ji-won can go nearly a week without sleep if need be. Probably thanks to his mother’s blood, since Pugnators are a warrior species that never learned to trust anyone, and evolutionary speaking it’s ended up with a species that can get away with staying awake indefinitely. Kind of. She’s of the opinion that micro naps don’t count, that it’s all bullshit, and maybe that whole species is always so cranky just because they’re always tired. 

Ji-won doesn’t look away from carefully angling their ship through a hole in a destroyed luxury liner. “If you’d wanted to blast through this whole thing, you should have stolen a ship with better shields. I can brute force my way through the outer rings but not through eighteen inches of solid steel.” 

She misses their ship more and more. In Boomerang Ji-won could have gotten them to the center in a couple hours, but now it’s taking them days. 

They’re running low on snacks. 

Addy holds out a granola bar to her, and five seconds later her stomach grumbles. “Monitoring my biodata is cheating,” she says, but takes the granola bar. 

He flicks his eyes back to look at her, a smile in the corner of his lips. “I don’t have the processing power to do that these days. Luckily, I have over twenty years of data to extrapolate from. You get crabby when you’re hungry.” 

“Who doesn’t?” she asks. She isn’t sure if she should feel touched that Addy still knows her so well or worried at the state of his servers. 

“Almost there,” Ji-won says, interrupting her before she can decide. 

She leans forward, watching intently as Ji-won eases the ship through another debris layer. She keeps quiet, preferring not to be the reason they all die in crash of metal and vacuum. 

When they finally manage to get into the eye of the storm, Ji-won groans and Addy reaches back to smack the first bit of her that he can reach, which ends up being her shoulder. “Tara!” 

“Huh,” she says, even as she feels her pulse race, because Roksana isn’t here to play it cool, so she’ll have to do it for her. “Guess they’re not happy to see us.” 

She’s just guessing, but the row of battleships with their cannons pointed right at them do seem to give that impression. 

~

Something’s wrong. 

It’s late, for a given definition of time when the space station isn’t orbiting a star, and it’s not like Thargelia doesn’t need to sleep, of a sort, so there’s no reason for her to be pacing her office in the middle of the night, her suit jacket thrown over her chair, her shirt unbuttoned, and her heels discarded under her desk. Except that things aren’t going to plan. 

One on hand, that’s not exactly surprising, since things have never gone to plan with Sassani. She’s so very human, and one of those wonderful little human skills is to throw a wrench into even the best laid plans, so one could look at like Sassani just living up to the expectations of her species. 

But on the other hand, Thargelia has known Sassani since she was screaming, feral child prone to biting anyone or anything that got too close. Another very human trait that Sassani is infamous for indulging in is being spiteful to the point of self-sabotage. 

Yet for weeks she’s been with a new traveler, the last pure human from Earth that anyone will ever get, and she hasn’t done anything that Thargelia can punish her for. Sassani should be foaming at the mouth. He’s not even a chartered customer. He’s bewildered and frightened at not having asked for this, so he’s exactly the type of person that Sassani loves to turn into a victim. She shouldn’t be able to resist trying to “save” him or something equally ridiculous. By now she should have attempted to pull off some sort ludicrous stunt in her attempt to help Roberts that Thargelia can hold up to investors as reason to terminate Sassani, regardless of her projected earning potential.

But she hasn’t. So unless Sassani has learned restraint in the past five years, which is something she hasn’t demonstrated in the thirty seven years previous, something is going on. Even worse than that, something is going on that she doesn’t know about.

If only she had the biology to develop some sort of normal human coping mechanism, like alcoholism.

~

“We’ve been in worse situations than this,” Addy says out of the corner of his mouth, like he’s trying to be comforting, and Ji-won would roll his eyes if he felt comfortable taking them off of their captors. 

They don’t usually get caught, so maybe they’ve been in worse situations, but it’s not normally with so many weapons pointed at them. They’re being escorted down a hallway, surrounded by an armed guard, with their ship seized and already in the process of being dismantled for parts. Even if they manage to escape, they won’t be able to take their ship back, so they’ll have to steal one. Which wouldn’t normally be a problem, except Addy’s can’t hack through security like he used to be able to, at least not without overloading some very important circuitry. Tara can probably do a manual override, but that will take too long. If they have to do it that way, they’ll likely get caught before they manage to get on their stolen ship. 

Then again, it’s not like they have a choice. 

Ji-won can feel his blades shifting against his bones and had to take several deep breaths to keep them sheathed underneath his skin. This isn’t a situation he can fight his way out of. They’re surrounded, and Tara’s okay in a fight, but surrounded like this she’s more of a liability than an asset, to say nothing of Addy. 

It’s times like these, and only times like these, that he misses the weight and warmth of Roksana at his back. There was a reason that they were the extraction team, and it wasn’t just because Roksana’s an adrenaline junkie. 

They’re taken into the main room, where Merry is pacing across the black tiled floor, not looking at either of them. Their frail appearance, nearly translucent skin and long thin limbs, always lead to people underestimating them. Their species’ name is hard for most aliens to pronounce, and it’s rarely used even by people who can say it. Glass People may not be the most creative of names, but it is certainly descriptive. 

One good punch, and Merry’s skin would shatter. But Merry’s true strength has never been physical. 

Ji-won hasn’t made that mistake in a long time. 

They stop pacing and turn to face them, arms crossed and something that can’t seem to decide on being a frown or a scowl twisting their thin lips. “Do you have it?” 

Tara raises an eyebrow. All that Roksana level bravado she’s been showing up until now is starting to fail, but that’s fine. Ji-won likes Tara just as she is, and if he still pauses for a half moment in conversations sometimes, waiting for a sarcastic comment that never comes, that’s no one’s business but his. Tara’s face is blank where Roksana would be laughing, contempt in Tara’s eyes where Roksana would be friendly, because Roksana always acts like everyone is on her side until they are, but Tara has never wanted or needed to use that tactic. 

She’s six and a half feet tall, the curve of her muscles obvious underneath her dark navy skin, the natural strength of her species aided by the long hours she’s spent training and strengthening her body. Tara may not be the so called muscle on the team - that was usually him, or Roksana, in spite of her slight stature – but she’s the most imposing out of all of them, on height and size alone, and she’s never shied away from using that to her advantage. 

“Answer me!” Merry snaps, and Tara must have really stolen their black book for them to be so rattled. They’re usually a very calm guy. Or guy-like-being. 

“How’s Boomerang?” she asks, voice as flat as her face. “I trust you’ve been taking care of her for me.” 

“As if I had a choice?” they spit. “Do you have any idea what that ship would sell for?” 

“Do you?” Tara asks, and now she sounds pissed. Sounds dangerous. Like the answer better not be that Merry was taking offers on their ship. 

Obviously Tara can’t scare them into giving her what she wants. For one, Merry has them completely outclassed in terms of firepower, and for two, Merry’s just not that easy to rattle even without an army at their beck and call. 

Merry sneers, but says, “She’s safe and sound. As demanded. I’ll take my book back now.”

“No.” All the guards raise their guns a little higher. Tara’s face doesn’t move. “You give us back our ship, we go on our way, and I return the book to you after we leave.” 

“Absolutely not,” they say, and it can be hard to read Merry’s face because their fine features tend to disappear when they turn at a certain angle, but Ji-won doesn’t need any help to realize they’re pissed. “I’m not letting you leave, again, with my property, so you can continue to blackmail me into doing you favors.” 

Addy snorts. He has that look on his face like he’s going to cause problems, and Ji-won wishes he were close enough to step on his foot. “What’s our other option?” he asks. “Giving it to you first so you can kill us after?” 

Merry has the audacity to look offended. “I’m not a murderer!” 

“No,” Tara agrees, dry, “_you_ aren’t.” 

The slow look around the room, and all of Merry’s pet murderers, is both excessive and pointed. 

“Well,” Merry adjusts the collar of their shirt, “yes. Well. What if I promise not to you kill you? Will that help?” 

“A promise from a liar?” Addy asks. “That’s not worth the air you’d waste to make it.” 

“Oh, and I suppose a promise from a thief is so much better?” he asks. “I don’t have to be nice about this, you know. I could torture it out of you!” 

“You won’t torture us,” Ji-won says, and both Tara and Addy give him a startled glance. He usually lets others do the talking. “You won’t kill us either. You’ll get what you want from us, and then you’ll sell us. You won’t get much for the Viatorum, but me and Addy? We fetch a pretty decent price.” 

“A broken down android and a quarter human mutt?” they sneer. 

“One of two remaining human simulation units and,” he pauses, “me.”

“You?” they retort. “You’re not worth anything.”

Addy makes an aborted gesture with his hand, like he was going to reach for him and then remembered where they were, and Tara’s face becomes a touch colder, which is telling on its own if you know her. He has to resist the urge to smile. He’s not a kid anymore. An offhand comment from Merry, of all people, doesn’t mean much to him.

He knows who he is. He knows his worth.

(And if Roksana abandoning them had let to him questioning that for the first time in a long time, well, that’s nobody’s business but his.)

“The sum of my parts are more valuable than the whole, is the thing. I’m all in the marketing, and you are so very good at marketing. A partial human medic. A bounty hunter with a hundred percent retrieval rate. Once of the only human traffickers to outsmart the agency. A Pugnator that speaks more than his own language. A Tilethiko away from his home planet. So many ways for you to spin it, and only one of me.”

Merry’s thin lips press together. “We’ve worked together before. If I didn’t try and sell you then, why would I try and do it now?” 

“Because we’ve been out of commission for the past couple of years, Roksana has been repossessed by the agency, and you think that means we’re fair game, that not only could you sell us but that you’d be able to find buyers.” He leans in. “Have you forgotten who we are? What we’ve done?” 

Addy pulls his shoulders back and Tara stands to maximize every inch of her looming frame. They’ve both relaxed too, confidence falling over them now that they’ve figured out the angle he’s playing. 

“A glorified transporter,” Merry says, but they’re also rolling back on their feet, their clear skin turning cloudy around their chest with nerves. 

Ji-won doesn’t tick them off on his fingers as he speaks, because Roksana isn’t here, he’s not her, and that kind of goading showboating had always been her schtick. “The Queen of Maji. Ambassador T’kar. Colonel Lionel of the Intergalactic Monitoring Taskforce,” he pauses before delivering the final nail in the coffin, “Artemis de Rosa.”

Artemis is only half human, but that was enough to strengthen her skin, to grow her muscles. Unlike the rest of her planet, she isn’t akin to glass. She;s steel, and had been recognized thusly. She’d been kidnapped by the Agency when she was a child, back when Roksana was still being held there, barely older than Artemis had been at the time. 

She’s also the head of Merry’s clan group. It’s how Ji-won had met them in the first place, through Roksana and the endless amount of people she seems to have some sort of connection with. 

“Roksana freed Lady Artemis before she met either you or Adexios,” they say, voice high, and thin little cracks appearing around the skin of their cheeks. “I’m not going to sell or harm Tara, so she has no reason to care what happens to you. She never even met you! And Adexios was one of the people who helped capture her, so she especially won’t care about him.” 

“You’d be right,” Ji-won says, still remaining calm, remaining cordial, “except you know that’s not the way humans work. We’re Roksana’s people. We’re of her clan, regardless of distance or blood ties, and when Artemis finds out that you were going to sell Roksana’s clan-”

“You started it!” they interrupt. “You blackmailed me!” 

Ji-won leans forward. “Let’s call her right now and see what she has more of a problem with. And keep in mind how many people will still be willing to trade with you when they find out you’ve been put on Artemis’s blacklist.”

Merry’s the first to look away, because of course they are.

“Lovely,” Ji-won says, “we’ll take our ship back now. Please.” 

Tara’s snort of laughter that she badly fails to disguise as a cough is more satisfying than every runaway criminal he’s collected over the past five years. 

~

Roksana runs her fingers over the top edge of her sheets as she slides into bed. She doesn’t pause or hesitate or flinch, doesn’t give any sort of reaction at all, because they’re so close to the end of this and she’s used to being watched every moment of every day. 

She curls under the blankets like she’s done every day since Thargelia has deigned to give her a room and a bed and blankets, and once again runs her fingers against the thick band of the flat sheet, slower this time, where her actions are hidden from all fourteen of the cameras placed throughout her room. 

Now that Archi doesn’t have the excuse of mopping right outside her room, they’ve had to get creative. She’s being watched at all times, but even Thargelia isn’t paranoid enough to have her sheets checked for braille stitched into the edging. 

Well, she isn’t now, at least. Roksana imagines that’ll change in the future. 

Their communication can only run one way right now, and she misses it more than she thought she would, those few seconds of snatched conversation with Archi. It’s not like she’s being isolated without it, she speaks to Isaac every day, but it’s not the same. 

Archi had been her confident, of a sort, and Isaac is someone she’s lying to.

It’s not as if she has a choice, and it’s not like it’s personal. Which is ironic, in a way, because everything between them should be personal. 

She’s not lying to him, exactly, but she is playing the part of semi-obedient prisoner, isn’t warning him and badmouthing the Agency like she’d love to do, and it’s wrong, because she owes him the truth, if nothing else. 

But she has to prioritize. Her people come before anything else, which means she can’t rescue Isaac from this new kind of prison if that means risking the people she got into this mess for to begin with, no matter how much she’d like to, 

Which mean when Roksana gets the message from Archi that something has gone wrong, that something has gone askew in her very carefully laid plan, she has to push down an extremely unfamiliar emotion. 

Panic. 

~

Adexios manages to keep his mouth shut until they’ve been delivered to their ship – shiny and unharmed and as beautiful as the first day Roksana and Tara won it in a gambling house – but as soon as the doors close shut behind them he says, “Doesn’t Artemis hate Roksana ever since that thing with the jello and the treaty?”

“She does,” Tara says, offhand. “She definitely does. So for the last fifteen years, at least. Possibly more and she was hiding it, but at least fifteen. But I guess Merry doesn’t know that.”

Ji-won doesn’t answer them, brushing his hand against the wall as they walk to the bridge. Adexios softens and asks, “Just like we never left, isn’t it?” 

“Hm,” Ji-won grunts, and that was the wrong thing to say. Adexios wants to take it back, to say the right thing, to let Ji-won enjoy this moment without overthinking it, but he knows it’s too late for that.

Tara shoots him a commiserating glance, but he just shakes his head. Ji-won has been unwilling to budge on this for the past half-decade, it’s going to take more than a couple weeks together to change that, if they even can change it.

The bridge is just as they left it, except better, because last time Adexios was here the screens were broken and malfunctioning and everything was a half moment away from disaster.

He wonders, looking back on it, if any of it had been real, or if it had been another piece in Tara and Roksana lying to them. He wants to ask, but of course he can’t. He’ll have to wait to get Tara alone to do that.

“We’re following the traveler’s signal then?” he asks instead, the only safe question in his head. He pulls up the tracker, connecting the data into the mainframe so he can start plotting a course for them. He used to be able to do this in his head, with barely any lag time, but he doesn’t have that kind of processing power these days, and if the mainframe’s navigation isn’t quite as good as he used to be – well, it’s not like any of them have a choice.

Ji-won’s mouth tightens before he forces himself to relax. “Going straight to the Agency to kidnap the last human traveler is suicide.”

It’s not that Adexios disagrees, but. “It’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To go get the traveler?”

“Not at the cost of our own lives,” he says. “How do you plan on sneaking aboard their ship? Because we can’t outgun them, even on Boomerang. Outrun them, maybe, but that doesn’t help us actually get the traveler from their ship to ours.”

He could have probably hacked into their system and gotten them landing and boarding permissions, before. But now the best idea he can think of is crawling in through their waste disposal chutes, which is incredibly dangerous, and there’s no way to know if the Agency has added security there since the last time he was on their space station. He would have, if he was Thargelia.

“Actually,” Tara says, hovering by the doorway. She usually doesn’t emerge from the bowels of the ship if she doesn’t have to, preferring to speak to them through the intercom system instead of schlepping to the helm of the ship, but she’s still here, even though she must be itching to double check that Merry hasn’t messed with anything and that nothing has gone wrong in her absence. “Actually, we don’t need a plan.”

Adexios doesn’t put his head in his hands, but only so he can give Tara his most disapproving stare, the same one he’s been giving her since she was a teenager. “Another step in Roksana’s plan, then?”

Ji-won pauses, turning in his seat to glare at Tara, who looks like she’s regretting her decision to have this conversation face to face. “How could you have a plan for this? Unless, of course, you never intended for the traveler to be rescued before reaching the Agency in the first place.”

No. It can’t be. Roksana wouldn’t sacrifice someone like that, wouldn’t risk a human from her own time period like that.

Tara’s face is smooth, not giving anything away.

“You didn’t,” he says, even though of course he already knows the answer. “Why – what’s the point of all this, then? If Roksana let herself get captured so she could save this traveler, then what’s the point of the traveler getting caught in the first place?”

“Don’t you get it, Addy?” Ji-won asks. Lemons are sweeter than the look on his face. “She needs a getaway car.”

“_Hey_,” Tara snaps, looking properly mad for the first time since she’d called him. “You know better. That doesn’t even make sense. If all she needed was a ride, I could have done that on my own, or called in a favor. Don’t do that. Be pissed at her all you want, but only for the things she’s actually done.”

“If that’s not the plan, then what then?” Ji-won demands. “Enough of this flying in the dark. Tell us what’s going on and what we’re doing.”

Tara scrapes her lip against her bottom teeth, eyes darting between them. “No.”

Adexios sighs. Ji-won smacks his hands on the center console. “What? What do you mean no?”

“Not sure how I can simplify it, Jiji.” Oh no, she must really be looking for a fight if she’s using that nickname. “_No_. If you don’t want to help, fine. Get us out of here, I’ll drop you off at the nearest outpost, and do it myself.”

“You can’t, you don’t have experience flying a ship this big,” Ji-won argues.

Tara shrugs, a purple flush over her navy skin. “Not well. But I can fly it, and I will if you won’t.”

“You,” Ji-won pauses. “You’ll get caught. And they have no reason to keep you alive like Roksana, if they capture you then they’ll kill you.”

Tara shrugs, as if it doesn’t matter, as if that means nothing. And maybe on one hand it’s nothing new, she’s been following Roksana into near certain death for decades, but it’s also unacceptable in every way.

Ji-won is frozen, mouth agape, obviously torn between his principles, his pride, and letting Tara do something so suicidally stupid.

Adexios breaks first, because he can do this, he can be the one that’s soft spined on the surface if it gives Ji-won an out without hurting his pride, he can be the one that acquiesces and lets both Tara and Ji-won do what they need to.

If it were anything less dire, less so clearly life and death, Adexios wouldn’t put up with it, with being left in the dark and manipulated and lied to, but three lives obviously hang in the balance. Tara’s, the traveler’s, and Roksana’s.

Whatever this secret plan is, it obviously needs Ji-won piloting this ship to work. So that’s what it’ll have.

“Fine,” Adexios says. “We’ll help you. We’ll follow you blindly and just hope it doesn’t get us killed. But if you don’t tell us what’s going on, if you don’t read us in just a little, that’s it. After, we’ll go our separate ways, and this time it stays that way. Ji-won and I aren’t tools for you to use.”

He thinks that’ll do it, that this’ll be the thing to make Tara pause and think and actually tell them what’s going on.

He’s wrong.

“Fine. If that’s what you want.” She turns, leaving the bridge to head to engineering. “Now get us out of here before Merry gets any bright ideas.”

He doesn’t even realize he’s moved to go after her until he feels Ji-won’s hand around his wrist, stopping him and pulling him back, and he tugs at him, desperate suddenly to go after Tara, to not leaving things like this. To not let her call his bluff. “Hey,” Ji-won says softly, still not letting go.

Adexios turns and uses his free hand to grab onto Ji-won’s shirt, bunching up the material near his heart. “This isn’t right. This isn’t like Tara.”

She can be stoic and sarcastic, she can even be mean, but she isn’t callous, and certainly not to and about the people that matter to her. She cares too much for that. It’s something she and Ji-won have in common, it’s why the two of them always get along.

Always _used to_ get along.

“People change, Addy,” Ji-won says, rubbing a hand up and down his back.

Not like that. Not this much. Tara and Roksana have known each other since Roksana took her first breath in the future, it was Tara who caught her before she stumbled to the ground, and of course Tara is dedicated to her, of course she’s going along with whatever Roksana’s plan is, Adexios wouldn’t expect anything less.

He just hadn’t been prepared to be cut out. For Tara and Roksana to draw a line, and to find himself on the other side of it.

“Hey,” Ji-won says, tipping his head up so he can look him in the eye. “Maybe there’s more going on here, okay? Tara must have a reason for not telling us everything.”

Adexios almost wants to laugh except for the way he doesn’t want to laugh at all. Ji-won doesn’t believe that, has been saying exactly the opposite the whole time, but he’s still saying it because he knows it’s what Adexios wants to hear.

He leans up, pressing his lips to Ji-won’s, and he hopes even as his code continues to degrade that his sensory processing is the last thing to go, because he doesn’t want to lose this, his lover’s lips on his and his arms around him.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says, pressing one more quick kiss to the corner of Ji-won’s mouth before walking back over to the navigation console.

They’re only about a week’s flight from the Agency space station. For better or worse, this is all going to be over soon. Then they can all pick up the pieces of who they were and decide who they’re going to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	6. Chapter 6

Isaac knows that something has changed.

Roxy’s behavior hasn’t changed, she’s still patient and quiet with the promise of violence simmering beneath her skin and the cut of her glare every time something ticks her off, which doesn’t seem to be happening with any more frequency than usual. But even still, Isaac can tell.

Something has her spooked, or nervous, or uneasy.

He can’t even ask about it. With the way they’re always being watched if he asks her what’s wrong they’ll see him to do it, and it’ll give them the idea that something is wrong, which considering how hard Roxy is working to make it seem like everything is fine, is probably the last thing that she wants.

So instead he works on his coding, the new languages finally starting to click, and the first time he finds the solution before she does, she smiles at him, real and unguarded and the most human thing he’s seen since waking up in this strange time.

~

Tara knows she’s pushing them away by doing what she’s doing, but she doesn’t know how to stop.

She tosses and turns in her room down by the engines. It should be good to back in her own bed, wrapped in the comforter she’s been dragging around after her since she was a girl, with all her things and the comforting whir of the engine to lull her to sleep.

But it’s been another day of her not speaking to Addy or Ji-won, and no matter how exhausted she is, she can’t seem to get to sleep.

She throws her blankets off of her, inviting the chill of the air over her bare legs and tossing a heavy arm over her face.

It’s not like she’s being secretive on purpose, because she doesn’t trust them or because she feels entitled to their help, although she supposes she does feel the second part, at little bit.

But she can’t tell them what the plan is because she doesn’t know what it is.

This is the end of her knowledge of how this is all going to go down, possibly because Roksana didn’t want her to know everything, but more likely because by the time Roksana had gotten taken in by the Agency she hadn’t had it all figured out quite yet.

She can’t tell Addy and Ji-won that.

It’s one thing for them to follow her blindly, to do as she says without understanding why, but it’s quite another for them to follow her when she doesn’t know where she’s going, when it’s just the blind leading the blind. She needs their help, she doesn’t know what Roksana’s plan is, but she knows it needs the both of them, so she can’t risk telling them the truth.

Because the truth is that she doesn’t know what she’s doing.

Once upon a time that wouldn’t matter, they’d march to Roksana’s orders without knowing the full scope of them, but things are not like they once were. They’ve all been apart for five years, and Addy hasn’t changed that much, his code is degrading and his hardware is starting to show it, but in spite of that he’s still the same in the only way that matters – the way he smiles when he looks at her.

Ji-won is different, and it’s not that it’s surprising, they assumed that this is what would happen, but it still hurts. He’s half the reason for the deception in the first place, because Ji-won could never abandon them, would never abandon Roksana, no matter what they stood to gain or any order Roksana gave.

So they had to make it seem like Roksana abandoned him first. But after half a decade, the difference between pretending to betray him and actually doing it seems like semantics, especially without Roksana there in front of him to explain it all.

Tara curls into her side, tugging her pillow out from under her head so she can hold it to her chest.

She’s depending on Roksana to fix the mess she’s making. She keeps telling herself that once she’s back on the ship everything will be better, once she’s there to laugh with them and at them, to fight with them and for them, everything will be alright, if not what it once was.

It’s important to her, that everything be alright, that she and Roksana haven’t broken anything past the point of mending with their actions.

~

The problem, Roksana discovers after several more sheet changes and more little braille messages, is that they’ve started putting their trash into an incinerator before pushing it out into space. Which wouldn’t matter to her at all, except that she’d been planning to escape from the garbage chutes, but now that’s no longer an option, unless she wants to be burned to death before her corpse is shot into deep space.

She doesn’t have a lot of time to figure something else out, what with her ride scheduled to drive by in a couple days, with any luck. She’s just going to find a different exit strategy. It’s times like these that she misses Addy most. Tara and Ji-won had never met a problem they couldn’t brute way force themselves though, and that just isn’t that type of problem.

She freezes, only remembering to take a couple deep breaths so that Thargelia doesn’t see anything odd if for some reasons she reuses this footage later.

If they can’t do it without someone seeing them, they should do it so everyone will see them.

She doesn’t want to get caught, of course, her original plan had been to slip away and get half a day away before anyone else even noticed that she was gone. But now that’s no longer an option, so she’ll have to accept doing this plan with slightly more risk than she’d anticipated.

But if she’s going to take on more risk, then she might as well try for a bigger reward.

Initially, the plan had just been to figure out where the last traveler was going to be placed and to grab them from there once the dust had settled. They’d always had better success in retrieving humans once they were out of the direct clutches of the Agency, so this whole five year stint in this place had been, primarily, an information gathering mission.

But when she’d come up with this plan, she hadn’t expected them to add damned flame throwers to the garbage chutes. She also hadn’t anticipated being given such long, frequent access to the last traveler. So, with this new information available to her, she comes up with a new plan. 

~

There’s debate on the capacity of her emotional range, but at times like these Thargelia is sure that her emotional range must be very wide to encapsulate the hate she’s holding back behind her teeth.

By times like these she means investor meetings, of course.

“How are you going to remain sustainable?” Gialop demands, a being made of a mass of quivering orange gelatin and several dozen narrowed eyes. “If we have the last human, then no more are coming!”

“He is the last original, full human we’ll get from Earth,” she says calmly, “but human hybrids are still quite available, and even several pure humans still exist, if several generations removed.”

“How’s the breeding program going?” asks Diaf, a woman whose species looks a little like a praying mantis if one had never actually seen a praying mantis, only had it described to them, and didn’t have a very good imagination.

Thargelia wishes they’d stop asking about that. “As found previously, human infants are delicate and are quite hard to care for. Most don’t live past the first year, and those that do are sickly. They don’t make good resources.”

She’s pretty sure that it has something to do with the air, some sort of bacteria they’re exposed to that growing in a womb or drinking from the teat seems to protect them from. Children with human fathers and non-human mothers tend to fare just fine, but that might just be down to being a hybrid. Humans, unfortunately, seem genetically compatible with a large range of species, and their offspring tend to be rather impressive, so whatever the problem with full human babies is, mixed children don’t seem to share it, nor children born of a human womb. Regardless as to why, the program was an expensive failure, and she’s found it’s never to her benefit to remind investors of the ways she’s lost them money.

“Hm,” Diaf frowns. “And what of Roksana Sassani?”

It’s not her imagination how everyone around the table leans forward the slightest bit in interest, but she wishes it was. “She’s currently working with the traveler to get him up to speed and in rentable condition.”

“And?” Gialop prompts when she doesn’t say anything further.

Stabbing him in one of his eyes would be so, so satisfying, and surely he doesn’t need all of them. “One could say she’s doing fine, I suppose.”

Which of course was the wrong thing to say, because the rest of the meeting devolves into excited, ridiculous chatter about what sort of price they’ll get for contracting out the infamous Roksana Sassani, and for a single, vicious moment Thargelia hopes that whatever Sassani is up to ends up costing all these people dearly.

~

Roxy is leaning over him, her hand on the back of his neck, and her index finger taps against the base of his skull. It’s too deliberate to be an accident, and after a moment to visualize it, Isaac realizes that it’s just at the edge of his skull, so her actions are covered by his hair. Her voice is even and smooth, not giving anything away as she explains the finer points of internationally accepted dinner manners while he manipulates the code on the screen. He tries to relax, to make his face look serious, to make it look like he’s concentrating on what she’s saying and not what he’s feeling.

It’s simple, a language he learned as a kid for fun and never forgot, because that’s part of what makes him such a good programmer. He doesn’t forget anything, and he notices more than people think he does. So it’s not even a question of sitting still, of listening, of if he’ll do what she says. Of course he will.

Roxy taps out Morse Code against his skin and something brighter than bleak acceptance of his circumstances settles in his chest.

~

“Alright,” Ji-won says, speaking in a calm, even tone that he knows Tara hates. “We’re a couple hours out from the Agency. What are we doing?” She’s been avoiding them, as much as she can when they’re all on the same ship. She feels guilty, which is something at least, and he knows she would like nothing better than for him to rage at her, to snap at her and be rude and unreasonable, if only because that would give her something to be angry about in turn, but he won’t give her that satisfaction.

Whatever negative emotions she’s feeling she’ll have to deal with herself. According to Addy she’s spending every free minute she has in the gym, which is annoying to him only because that limit the amounts of time he can spend their himself. Biologically he doesn’t have to work out much to maintain his strength, certainly not as much as if he were a full human, but that doesn’t change that it’s something he likes to do. 

Tara is tense enough to snap herself in half, in the same room as them for the first time in days, but her attention isn’t even on them, instead focused on the maps and calculations flashing across the screen. She scrapes her teeth over bottom lip. “Put up the cloaking shields and get as close as you can to the space station without being detected. If you have to choose between not being seen over being closer, choose not being seen.”

“Then what?” he asks, already adjusting the control to redirect some power to the cloaking shields. He’ll have to remember to switch that back when they need it, otherwise they won’t last long under fire.

“We wait,” she says simply, and he pauses, looking over to see if she’s joking.

Addy spins around his chair to do the same, hands pausing over the navigation controls. “You want us to just hover beneath the Agency space station indefinitely?”

“This wasn’t exactly something we’d planned down to the minute,” she snaps.

Ji-won glares, because she knows better than to take this out on Addy. It doesn’t matter if he’s older than all of them combined, or that he knew Tara as a teenager, and so at her most bratty. Ji-won will tolerate a lot, but he won’t tolerate that.

She doesn’t apologize, but she does take a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them she’s shoved down all her nerves and anger. “Here,” she walks over and grabs a padd, writing out a quick series of numbers and then holding it out to Addy. “Play something at this frequency. It doesn’t matter what.”

“She’s got a scanner in there?” he asks as he takes it from her.

“Someone does,” she says, and Ji-won blinks. She seems to realize her slip up immediately, her cheeks flushing purple as she takes a step back. “Anyway, just play something, and wait. She’ll take care of the rest.”

“Tara, what are you saying?” Ji-won tries, but she won’t answer.

Addy’s eyes narrow. “What aren’t you saying?” he asks, trying to press for more, but of course it’s the wrong question, because there’s so much that she’s not saying. She just shakes her head and retreats to the engine room. They let her, because what else are they supposed to do? She’s made it more than clear that they’re not able to force her to answer them.

“Does,” Ji-won pauses, “does she have someone working for her on the inside?”

“You know,” Addy says slowly, “I never asked how, exactly, she’d gotten the coordinates of the traveler’s arrival to Tara in the first place.”

It’s unthinkable. After Addy had defected, the agency had tightened security to the point of near ridiculousness. It seems impossible that they’d have a mole, one who was willing to help Roksana, of all people. Except, he can’t even begin to imagine how Roksana would have even begun to pull all this off on her own if she hadn’t had some help.

Well, he tells himself, there’s no use speculating.

They’ll find out the truth soon enough.

~

The problem Roksana has, of course, is communicating her change of plans to Archi. She can’t speak to him, of course, hasn’t even seen him since she was moved from her cell. She’d worry that it was deliberate, but if Thargelia suspected Archi of anything, there’s no way he’d still be walking around and able to stitch messages into her bedsheets.

For a single breathless, extremely paranoid moment, she considers the idea that Thargelia has gotten to Archi, has already killed him, and these coded messages are actually from Thargelia and she’s just playing right into her hands.

Then it passes, and she takes a slow, deliberate breath. If that were the case, Thargelia would have no reason to tell that the trash chutes weren’t a viable option anymore, if she knew how and when she was planning to make a break for it then she’d have no reason to try and make her change her plan or even possibly abandon it. If Thargelia catches her trying to escape she might finally be able to convince the investors to have her terminated, and there’s no way she’d put her chance to get rid of her at risk like that just to play some mind games. So it’s not what’s happening, and there’s no use acting as if it is. Instead she continues running through her new plan in her mind, trying to think of all the ways it can go wrong and what she can do to stop that from happening.

In the end all she can think of is leaving a message behind for him to find. It’s too big a risk to take on anything less than what will hopefully be her last day on the Agency’s space station.

The night that she curls into her bed and runs her hands over the edge of the sheets and finds the message she’s been waiting for, she has to turn her face into her pillow to hide her smile.

Stitched in braille, bigger than he’s dared so far, is a simple message.

_Signal transmitting. _

~

Isaac knows that it’s time the second Roxy walks into his room.

It’s not something obvious, she’s not that sloppy. Her hair is done in a long braid down her back, she’s wearing the same white uniform as always, including the impractical sandals that she can’t run in. She’s smiling at him, but she always does that, there’s no winking or little gestures, nothing to tip someone off that today is a day different than any other.

But Isaac knows, because Roxy, in spite of being physically identical to how she’s looked every other time she’s come to see him, looks like a completely different person.

He knows she’s here under duress, knows by the two guards always with her that she’s something like a criminal, that doing this is supposed to her repenting, somehow, except he’s never seen her act the least bit sorry. Thargelia had made some offhand comments, that she’d made seem accidental but that he was sure were entirely deliberate, about things that Roxy had done, on why she was here.

He understood that humans were in short supply these days, that they were even more than an endangered species. From the hints he’s been not so subtly given, he understands that Roxy had interrupted that, somehow, had been responsible for there being less, but that doesn’t make sense with what he knows of her, with what he knows of the Agency.

So he’d known the Roxy was someone who’d done things that others considered bad, but she was pretty and nice and on his side, and he’d imagined it was something like passing along information, something small and just to the left of criminal.

But looking at her now, he understands why that assumption was probably the wrong one.

Roxy is holding herself differently, like she’s the tallest person in the room even though she’s the shortest. She walks and moves like he’s seen generals and snipers move, as if they have a complete understanding of their skills and their power and their place in the world, whatever it might be.

Looking at Roxy now, it occurs to Isaac for the first time that she could be dangerous.

It still doesn’t change anything for him, though, so he smiles at her like he does every morning and lets her sit right up against him, leaning against his shoulder as they go through the day’s lessons. Her only real tell is the way her eyes keep flickering to the clock, but that could be for anything, so he bites his tongue. Him telling her to stop would draw more attention to them than her doing it in the first place.

He’s not sure what she’s waiting for, he doesn’t see or hear anything that could be any type of signal, but then she reaches up and taps the back of his neck.

It’s not Morse Code this time, just a sign for him to start, and he has to resist the urge to swallow as he pulls up a different program than the one he’s assigned for the day.

He’s already in the system, so getting into the surveillance program isn’t easy, but it is possible. There are hundreds of cameras in the space station, and he waits for the tap on the back of his neck to tell him which ones he’s shutting off. At first it seems random, hallways and rooms that he’s never seen before, but slowly he sees that he’s creating a path from where they are to the loading dock.

The cameras go dark, but there’s no way to know how long that will last, how long it will take someone to notice the several dozen cameras that have gone off out of hundreds, and no way for them to know who will be in their path and trying to stop them. Besides all that, they have to get past Roxy’s two escorts and out a locked door, and he can hack the cameras, but those doors are on a completely different system, one that he can’t get access to.

Roxy’s eyes are still on the clock, waiting, and her eyebrows have just dipped together in concern when he hears the door swish open and someone step inside.

Isaac turns, already dreading what he’ll find. He assumes it’s Thargelia, who’s already noticed the cameras and is here to put a stop to all of it.

It’s a custodian pushing his cart into the room. He’s an older man with white stubble and electric blue eyes, and Isaac doesn’t even have the time to be relieved before he notices a sparkling tazer in the custodian’s hands.

Roxy’s escorts hadn’t even turned around at the custodian’s entrance, and they don’t see it coming when he jams an electrical current in both of their backs, quick enough that Isaac is sure that he’s accomplished nothing at all.

He thinks that for about three seconds, which is how long it takes the androids eyes to slip shut and for them to topple to the ground, making an odd, low beeping sound.

“Hi Archi. You’re right on time,” Roxy says approvingly.

He glares, flicking the tazer off and sticking it in his back pocket. “Well isn’t that lucky. Really? Writing a note on your sheets in who knows what – it better not have been blood, Miss Sassani – with no way of knowing if I would see it of if I could even pull off what you asked me to do.”

Roxy rubs at her arm and says, “Come on, Archi, don’t be like that. No one gets anywhere without a little faith.”

Archi huffs but bends down, wrestling one of the androids out of their clothes. “Come on, young man, are you going to help me with this or are you just going to watch?”

“You should go help him, if we’re not out the door in forty five seconds the timing of everything else is going to be off,” Roxy says, pushing him out of the chair to take his spot. “Take off your clothes and put those on. I know it’s all just white and you think they’re the same, but they’re really not.”

In for a penny and all that. He helps Archi get the clothes off then hurries to put them on, even stuffing his feet in the too big boots at Roxy’s direction while she stays glued to the computer, hands flying over the keys faster than he’s seen so far. “It’s been forty seconds,” Archi says crankily.

“Right,” she says distractedly, “Luckily for all of us I’ve been keeping up with my stretches in between torture sessions these last few years.”

Isaac has no idea what she’s talking about until she walks over, flips open the top of the disposal bin on Archi’s cart, and climbs inside. She hugs her knees to her chest, just barely managing to squeeze inside. She’ll have to keep her head bent if she wants the lid to close properly. “Isaac, walk a couple steps behind Archi, and try to hold yourself really stiffly and look like you don’t have feelings. Archi, take us to the viewing chamber, the ones on the north side.” 

“That’s in the opposite direction of the loading dock,” Isaac points out. Meaning the way to get there involves none of the cameras he’d dismantled.

“Exactly,” she says, “which means we’ll be going the opposite direction that everyone else will be heading once they notice the cameras.” She grabs the edge of the bin lid and flips it over, bending her neck so it closes over her with a satisfying thwack.

Isaac’s not sure what his face looks like right now, but whatever it is makes Archi laugh. “You haven’t gotten the full Roksana experience before, have you?”

Roksana? He hadn’t known Roxy was short for anything –

There’s a banging on the side of the bin, and then her muffled voice says, “Less talking, more moving.”

“We are on a schedule,” Archi says mildly, callously kicking the androids aside so he can grab his cart and push it back out of the room.

Isaac takes a moment to wonder if he should be feeling any sort of hesitance about this, reminds himself where he should be is his own time and his own planet, and follows him out.

~

When the alarm sounds, when a panicked voice tells her thought the intercom that two androids have been incapacitated and that Traveler Roberts and Sassani have gone missing, before anger, before worry, before fear, before any other simulated emotion her coding can fire off, Thargelia feels an overwhelming sense of relief.

No more playing nice. No more games. No more lies. Just Roksana finally showing her true colors. Thargelia can finally deal with her in the manner she’s always wanted to.

“Ma’am,” Jigef, her head of security says, meeting her as she steps out of her office. She looks down, and she knows he has the strength to easily snap her in half, steel core and all, but it’s hard to remember when he barely comes up to her elbow and his skinny arms look more like decorations to his thick frame than functional appendages. “We found a series of cameras that have been disabled. It looks like they’re going to the loading dock, probably to try and board and take over one of the transportation pods. I’ve already sent a team to head them off. No one will hear about this.” Meaning the investors, who won’t exactly be thrilled to hear that she’d briefly lost control of two travelers.

Thargelia takes of the offered padd, looking over the list of blacked out cameras, supposedly laying out the path Sassani and Roberts are taking. It’s a good plan. They don’t know where they are on this path, exactly, so they can’t send everyone straight too them. But it does tell them exactly where they’re heading, so it’s not as if Thargelia needs to know where they _are _because she already knows where they _will be_. Because it’s the only place they can go, because it’s the only place that has a means of transportation for them to escape on.

It’s a good plan. It all just seems a little short sighted for someone who’s been languishing in a cell for half a decade.

There’s no ship in the dock fast enough to outrun the Agency’s own collection ships, which are kept in orbit but not on the station. Unless they’re planning to take one of the smaller ships to a collection ship and hack into it, all before anyone can catch up to them. She also wonders about the wisdom of taking out the cameras. It makes sense at first thought – removing their ability to see them – but the only way this plan works is if they’re already leaving the space station by the time anyone notices they’re missing, and taking out the cameras just gives her one more thing to notice, seems like an unnecessary risk. If she notices the cameras before they’ve gone, then they’ve already lost, and if she notices them after they’ve gone, then taking them out was pointless.

If it were anyone else, Thargelia would chalk it up to an almost perfectly thought out plan. But Roksana Sassani isn’t anyone else.

“Put the station on lockdown and send teams to every exit on the station,” she orders. “All the observation decks, the supply acceptance windows, anything that leads out into space.”

Jigef’s eye widens. “You think she’s suicidal?” Humans can’t survive out in deep space for more than a minute or two, and they’re rendered unusable almost immediately. Jigef’s species can survive for nearly twenty minutes out there before any ill effects take place. To him, humans are laughably fragile.

“I think assuming we know what she’s thinking hasn’t served us well in the past,” she says evenly. “Get to it.”

He’s still hesitating. “Ma’am. If we put the station in lockdown, we’re required to alert the investors.”

“Better we alert them that of a failed escape and kidnapping attempt than a successful one,” she says. “_Go_.”

He bows his head and scurries away, barking into the communicator strapped to his wrist.

Thargelia runs her hand over the padd, highlighting every exit on the station and then tapping the room Sassani and Roberts would have left from. She doesn’t think that Sassani is suicidal, or interested in killing Roberts, for that matter. So to leave this station alive she either needs a ship or a spacesuit. There’s only one place to get a ship, and it’s the obvious path they’ve made for themselves. Spacesuits are kept near the loading docks, and even if she had one and managed to get out in space with it, then what good would that do them? They’d float uselessly out there until Thargelia send someone to go pick them up. It should be the loading dock. It where they have to be heading.

But she can’t shake the feeling that it’s not, that assuming just because it’s the only reasonable option means it’s the only available option.

So, what if she assumes things she’s has no reason to believe? What if they have space suits, and a way to leave the station? If they just need an exit, one secure enough for them to get ready and get outside, and big enough for them all to get out in their suits without too much trouble.

She taps her finger against the padd, touching Roberts’s room, the one they must have left from.

“Jigef,” she calls out, and his head snaps up. “Go to the northern observation room. Bring a team with you.”

His nose creases in confusion, but he doesn’t argue with her this time. “Yes ma’am.”

She has no reason to believe they’ll be there. There’s no logical or factual reason to think they’ll be heading anywhere but the loading dock.

But she can’t help but think she’s right, with no evidence to support it, and it’s times like these that remind her how impeccable her coding is, since it’s such a human thing for her to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow/harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	7. Chapter 7

Isaac expects that they’ll go out of their way to avoid people.

They don’t.

It’s a struggle to keep his expression blank at everyone they pass on their way to the observation deck. Nobody give them a second glance, most don’t even give them a first glance, but he feels a trail of sweat dripping down his neck and disappearing into the too stiff collar of his stolen shirt the whole time.

He doesn’t feel like he can breathe until they step into the observation deck and the door slides shut behind them. It’s a beautiful room, filled with ancient Earth artifacts behind glass cases, which means there are some things there that Isaac actually recognizes, and a giant window to observe the unending space surrounding the station. The first time he’d been here, Isaac had found it to be kind of vaguely threatening in a way he couldn’t put into words.

Archi flips the lid open on the trashcan and Roxy awkwardly pulls herself out of it. “Ow, that sucked.”

“I wish we could lock these now instead of having to wait for the override,” Archi mutters, turned back to the door with a considering look on her face.

“I wish I’d had a bigger breakfast this morning, but there’s nothing we can do about that now,” Roxy says. She walks over to one of the glass cases mounted to the wall and gives it a long, considering glance. Inside it is a white naval captain’s hat and jacket. “Do you still have that tazer?” 

Archi has crossed to the opposite side of the room and is busy running his hands over the walls. “No, I dropped it on the way here in the middle of a busy hallway, because that wouldn’t be at all suspicious.”

“Okay, what I meant was, can I have it?” she sighs.

Archi just flaps his hands at her, not looking away from his inspection of the wall, so Isaac rummages through the cleaning cart until he finds it and then hands it to Roxy. “What are you going to do?”

“I,” she says with obvious relish, “have always wanted one of these.” She jams the tazer against the glass and presses down. Electricity arcs across the glass, and then it shimmers and disappears. Which he’s assuming means that the case wasn’t actually made of glass. She tosses him the tazer, and he fumbles as he catches it, trying to neither electrocute himself nor drop it. She grabs the captain’s jacket and hat out of the display, rolls them up, and jams them under her arms. “Archi, I can fit these under the space suit, right? If you say no, I’ll cry, so I just want you to be prepared for that.”

“Miss,” he sighs, “I have never tried, so I really can’t answer that question.” The wall panel gives way under Archi’s hands, snapping away in such a clean line that it has to be designed to do that. “The suits are a little outdated.”

Roxy’s face has smoothed into seriousness, her bright eyes focused as she walks over to Archi. “It doesn’t matter, it’s not like we’ll be in them long enough to care.” She helps him pull out dark, bulky suits, and they look more like what astronauts would wear on Earth than the sleek suits that he’s seen other people wearing. She also stuffs the captain’s hat in jacket into the legs of one of them, and seems pleased, which Isaac assumes means that she’ll be able to fit both her leg and her souvenirs in there. “Weren’t these a pain to sneak in here?”

“Yes,” Archi says, “especially on such short notice.” Roxy shrugs, unrepentant. “That’s why they’re the older models. I had to take something that no one would miss.”

“Uh,” Isaac says, “how are we gong to get outside?” The type of transparent material used to make the windows on this space station are impenetrable to everything but the highest grade lasers, which he’s pretty sure they don’t have on hand, considering his mandatory reading had said they were only available on expensive battleships. That said, he wouldn’t exactly be surprised if Archi did have one of theose tucked away on his cart somewhere.

Roxy points to the corner. “The sensor panel is over there and there’s an emergency override that opens a side door. It’ll suck pretty much everything out when we open it and lock all the entrances down. The observation decks have the most unstable pressure fluctuation on the ship, but they look really cool. So if a ship has them, they’re required to have the option to destroy the whole thing so unstable pressurization doesn’t affect the rest of the ship.”

“And we know the override code?” he confirms.

Roxy shrugs.

“I brought a blow torch,” Archie says, because of course he did. “Now let’s get you into this.”

“So we’re going to trigger the emergency override and be tossed out into space in our outdated suits?” he confirms, even as he steps into the spacesuit Archi is holding out for him, and staying very still while Archi and Roxy pull it up over the rest of his body. These suits have two layers, one skintight like he’d wear to scuba dive, and then the bulkier suit on top of it. They buckle and tuck and zip him into place. For a suit that’s supposedly so outdated, they both seem very familiar with it.

Archi raises an eyebrow at Roxy over Isaac’s shoulder, but she only rolls her eyes. “We have a ride waiting for us out there. They’re cloaked, but they’re going to pick us up and then we’ll be on our way. We should only be floating for about ten minutes. Five if we’re lucky, fifteen if we’re not.”

“If we’re not lucky, Miss, you and Mr. Roberts will die out there,” Archi points out. He says to Isaac, “These suits are intended for quick tourist flights of about ninety seconds. They only have sixty minutes of air supply.”

“I’m very lucky,” she assures him, but Isaac doesn’t feel all that comforted by it. She shoves the helmet into his hands. “Put this on right before we initiate the override. The latches will connect automatically, but our limited air supply starts as soon as you put the helmet on, so you don’t want to do it too soon.”

His stomach feels a little queasy. Personally, he wishes he’d had a smaller breakfast this morning. He’s never thrown up in a space suit, but he can’t imagine it’s very pleasant. “Right. Okay.”

Roxy gives him a bright smile, but is in the middle of helping Archi put on his own suit, so she’s obviously more focused on that than him.

Red lights dance across the walls and Isaac’s confused for the half moment before the speakers announce in a cool, measured voice, “The station is entering lockdown. Please remain where you are.”

“Shit,” Roxy says, and Isaac tamps down on the surge of panic in his chest. She doesn’t seem that worried, so maybe it’s nothing to worry about. “I was really counting on her not wanting to alert the investors to this.”

Archi glares, but seems more concerned with adjusting the buckles on his suit than scolding her. “Hurry up and get dressed. The sooner we get out of here, the better.”

There’s a soft swishing sound as the door opens, and they’re all turning towards it, just in time to see three security workers stepping into the room, something that looks like a gun but is far more deadly in their hands and pointed straight at them. “None of you are going anywhere,” the leader says, a smirk twisting his abnormally flat mouth so it looks like a crevice in his face.

Roxy’s face has gone blank while Archi’s mouth is tight and his eyes are narrowed.

Isaac looks down. The taser Roxy had thrown at him is still in his hands.

He extends his arm and presses down, watching as the electricity arcs and hits the leader in the center of the chest.

~

Roksana is so close with getting away with all of it, with her five years of captivity actually being worth something, that seeing Jigef and his subordinates standing there leaves her momentarily frozen, something that almost never happens to her.

She’s so close. Too close. She won’t let herself lose now, not when she’s come so far.

Isaac reacts before she can, and Jigef’s species it too resilient to be taken out by electrocution, but his yelp of pain is distracting enough that they don’t focus on her and Archi for a second, and that second gives them a chance to move.

She’s made a living off this, built a life off coming up against the Agency and all that entails. She knows these people, knows their training, and knows where to hit so it hurts. She gets close, because up close is the only chance she has, and she’s lucky that it’s Jigef who Isaac electrocuted, because he’s quick enough that Roksana wouldn’t manage to get close enough at all if his attention was on her.

Archi is by her side, and he doesn’t have the training that she does, but he doesn’t need it. He has an advantage over her, after all. The split second of clarity and calm is gone almost instantly as she loses herself to the fight. They’re outnumbered, because Isaac isn’t a fighter, and maybe that wouldn’t matter so much if Jigef wasn’t here, but he is. He’s moving sluggishly, for him at least, but that only means he’s about as fast and precise as the other two security guards who haven’t been electrocuted.

If only they’d been quicker at putting on their suits. Then they could open the hatch and send these guys into deep space, although it would only really take care of two of them Jigef might have an even easier time capturing them out there, since they can’t maneuver that well in their suits and he can maneuver just fine without a suit at all. She gets elbowed in the face and doesn’t even have the time to process the pain radiating from her cheekbone before digging her knee into the closest guard’s spine.

The only way they’re getting out of here is if they kill these guards.

She’s not that upset over it. They’re Agency enforcers, and more than willing to kill her, of course, so there’s only so much guilt or remorse she can muster. That’s not the problem. It’s not about willingness, it’s about ability.

She had decades of experience behind her, but she doesn’t think it’s going to be enough.

Something sharp and painful pierces her side, and this time she cant’s keep her scream behind her teeth even as Archi pulls away whoever had just done that, and then there’s someone else’s hands on her and she reaches out blindly, jamming her fingers in as many eyes as she can reach, which makes the person shriek and let go of her, but doesn’t do as much good as she’d like since they have over two dozen eyes and all of them are glaring at her.

Roksana hasn’t noticed them moving in any particular direction while they’re fighting, but clearly Archi has, because she nearly trips over his overturned custodian cart, right next to the door. Archi shoves her back and bends down in the same motion, plucking something from his cart and then raising it up.

A small metal can is in his hand, looking not unlike most common cleaning solutions. Jigef roars, black blood running down his nose, and reaches for them.

Archi presses down and blue hot flames erupt from the nozzle.

There are shouts and screams as the security guards scramble away from the heat, although in Jigef’s case Roksana’s sure it’s more out of surprise than anything else. Then again, a fire that hot might cause some damage after the first few seconds, even for his species.

They step backwards, past the threshold of the door. Roksana is relieved only as long as it takes for her to see outside the door.

More security personnel are heading for them, charging down the hall, and if they can barely do anything against three, this is more than enough to overwhelm them.

She’s not going to escape. She’s going to die alone and in pain on the Agency space station, just like Thargelia’s always wanted.

Archi slaps the door so it slides shut, but it’s no use, they can’t lock these doors, and she means to tell him that, to stop making whatever his punishment will be worse for himself. Isaac will be fine, he’s the last pure, original human the Agency is going to get, after all. But if Archi doesn’t start dialing it back, he’s going to have a really hard time convincing Thargelia that Roksana forced him into helping her with all this.

“Archi,” she starts, voice soft and cajoling, but he ignores her.

He runs his fingers down his opposite forearms so the synthetic skin of his hands peels back, revealing the metal circuitry and wiring. “Stand back, Miss.” The door has just started to open again when he jams his metal fingers through the material of the door and hooks his thumbs into the wall, piercing the wall and anchoring the door closed with his hands alone.

She hears Isaac’s shout of surprise, but ignores it. She’d known that Archi was like Addy and Thargelia this whole time, of course. But most people don’t Thargelia had worked really hard to keep it that way.

“ARCHI!” she screams, running over to him and grabbing at his shoulders, trying to pull him away. He kicks off his shoes and does the same thing with his feet, shoving the underlying circuity and support structure into the floor with such force that that it breaks it apart, until he’s anchored both the door closed and himself in front of it. “What are you doing? The damage that’s done to you-”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says with such infuriating calm that she wants to slap him. “Hurry. I can’t keep this door closed forever. You only have minutes until they get something powerful enough to break it down.”

“And you!” she shouts. “Archi, I can’t get you into the space suit like this!” He stares at her, electric blue eyes solemn, and her stomach rolls. “Archi, no. That wasn’t the deal.”

“The hard drive is in in the pocket on my left thigh,” he says, voice still perfectly, heart breakingly even. “Give the others my regards.”

She shakes her head. As horrified as she’d been at the idea of dying here, the thought of leaving Archi behind is somehow even worse. “No, I – no! That wasn’t the deal! You help me and I take you with me, that was the deal! I can’t leave without you!”

“You have to. Circumstances have changed.” Her eyes are burning but her cheeks stay dry. The door creaks, pushing open a half inch before Archi shoves his shoulder against it and forces it all the way closed again. “Miss, I don’t have the time to argue with you. Go.” She shakes her head, gripping his arm as if she can attach herself to him like he’s attached himself to the door, as if she can save him like he’s saving her. “Won’t you think of Mr. Roberts?”

She pauses, looking over her shoulder.

Isaac is in the corner of the room, his eyes wide and his skin a couple shades paler than it really should be. He’d kept away from the fighting, because he would have only got in the way and seemed to know that, but he’s clearly terrified. The tears clear from her vision enough for her to see that he’s shaking. Archi says gently, “You can save yourself. You can save him. You can save even more people if you manage to get out of here. But you cannot save me. Go.” 

“She’ll kill you,” Roksana says quietly. He won’t be jettisoned into space because he’s quite literally stuck here, but that doesn’t mean he’ll survive. There’s literally no way that Thargelia will let him live after this, after betraying her like this.

“It’s been interesting knowing you, Roksana,” he says. “I might even say it’s been a privilege.”

She forces back a fresh wave of tears and leans forward to press a kiss to his cheek. “Thank you, Archi. For everything.”

She takes the hard drive and sticks it into her own pocket, walking over to the discarded space suits and shoving herself into the two layers as quickly as she can. Her body protests the movement, sharp pain shooting up her side and across her face, but she doesn’t have the time to worry about it now. There’s a sudden burst of shouting, and she glances over to see they’ve managed to pry open the door just enough for their voices to carry through. She goes over to pick up the discarded blowtorch, squeezes Archi’s arm and gives him one last tremulous smile, then marches over to Isaac. “You okay?”

He meets her eyes, glances at Archi who’s literally torn himself apart to keep that door closed, then shakes his head.

She almost feels a little less brittle at that, forcing a smile. If only they’d been a little quicker. “You will be,” she promises, pulling out the cord from her belt and attaching it to Isaac’s suit, pulling it tight so there’s only a few inches between them, then grabs his helmet and puts it on him, locking it in place. “Hold on to me, okay?” It won’t make that much of a difference, the cord will keep them together, but it gives him something to do and will also hopefully prevent his limbs from being too all over the place.

“Okay,” he says, stepping behind her to wrap his arms around her waist so he’s not in her way. She gets the impression he’d bury his face in her back like a little kid if his helmet wasn’t in the way.

Roksana put on her own helmet then lifts up the blowtorch, spares one more look at Archi, and presses down, aiming it at the sensor panel.

It takes almost no time at all for the override procedures to initiate, for them to be pulled out of the observation deck and into the darkness of space.

~

It’s probably a good thing that Adexios doesn’t actually need to sleep. Or, well, shutting down for a period of timing and rebooting is important for maintaining what little server health he has left, but the negative consequences are relatively minor.

“How long does she expect us to do this?” Ji-won mutters, slumped into his chair and glaring at the screens. Unlike his boyfriend, who also doesn’t technically need that much sleep thanks to his Pugnator ancestry, but who’s attitude would certainly benefit from a nap. Not that he’ll take one, of course, because that would make their lives far too easy.

Adexios reaches out to pat his arm and only rolls his eyes a little when Ji-won grab his hand and doesn’t let go, settling their joined hands onto the console between them. He can run a scan one handed, after all, so he’s not going to make a fuss about it. “It’s barely been a day.”

“A day of hanging out underneath the Agency’s space station hoping no one catches us and we die an inglorious death,” he says. “Really, this has practically been a vacation.”

Adexios would suggest they spend a couple weeks on a planet with lots of water after this, some place that has something approximately similar to Earth’s tropical beaches, but he knows that Ji-won would just moan about his ports and rust, even though he’s said a million times that he’s not going to rust away of all things, but he doesn’t have the energy for an argument they’ve already had too many times. “I have found it to be rather relaxing.”

Ji-won shoots him a suspicious glare and Adexios doesn’t bother to hide his smile. Ji-won straightens just enough to lean over so he can kiss the corner of his mouth. “I like your smile. It’s very kissable.”

If he had a free hand he’d use it to poke his boyfriend in the face. He’s debating whether it’s worth not holding Ji-won’s hand to get to irritate him instead when something flashes across the screen. He frowns, pulling his hand back so he can manipulate the controls. “Is that-”

“Shit!” Ji-won dives for the controls, putting as much power into the engines as he can while still maintaining the cloaking field. “I thought she was supposed to be in a ship! And alone! Who’s with her?”

“Well, the best laid plans of mice and Roksana,” Addy mutters, trying to zero in on the signal the scanner is picking up. He activates the intercom and says, “Tara, they’re not in a ship, you’re going to have to go get them.”

There’s a moment of silence, then, “Got it.”

“It’s too dangerous to send her out in one of rescue pods, it doesn’t have good enough cloaking or defense capability,” Ji-won says, carefully maneuvering the ship as close as they can to the two figures hooked together, wearing models of space suits that no one’s used in over a hundred years. “They’ll all end up dead if she does that. Why don’t they have a _ship_? This is ludicrous.”

Adexios runs several calculations through the computer, briefly mourning when he used to be able to do this in his head, then sends the results to Tara’s padd. “She’s not using a rescue pod.”

Ji-won’s face creases in confusion and it doesn’t smooth until an alert flashes across the screen that the anchor, which is used to keep the ship from floating away into space when it’s been shut down for repairs, has been manually deployed. “That’s not going to work.”

“I sent her the best numbers for successful deployment,” he says.

“It’s not going to work,” Ji-won repeats, but more slowly this time, like he’s not as sure of himself. Adexios would find Ji-won’s trust in his numbers more flattering if he were still able to compute them himself.

The anchor cord swings into their view. They both wince when it smacks into Roksana and whoever’s with her, but one of them manages to grab onto it, and the anchor cord starts pulling itself back, the both of them still attached to it.

“I can’t believe that worked,” he says, and Adexios has to bite down on the urge to laugh. It almost feels like old times. The scanner beeps an ominous alert, that the fighter ships waiting in orbit around the Agency’s space station have not only finally noticed that they’re here but are closing in. “Guess there’s no reason for cloaking now.”

“They at least have to guess where to hit,” Adexios says, already plotting their escape route.

“If they’re close enough to guess, we’re already dead,” he answers, redirecting all their power from cloaking to the engine and not directing any to shields, which seems like a bit of an audacious move, but then Ji-won is probably right. He doesn’t bother easing the ship into it, just pressing them forward and throwing the both of them back into their seats with enough force that Adexios feels it in his synthetic bones.

He hopes that Tara, Roksana, and their mystery guest managed to hold onto something and weren’t just flung into a wall. He almost points out that Ji-won could have warned that that he was going to do that through the intercom system, but he already knows that, which means he didn’t warn them on purpose.

Better he gets out some of his rage through petty acts of revenge before they have Roksana in front of them again.

He’s a mix of excited and nervous about it, that all of them are back on the same ship together after five years apart. He’s angry with them, of course, but well – Tara is still Tara and Roksana is still Roksana, no matter the rest of it.

Adexios wonders if it’s strange that they’re literally speeding away from over twenty fighter ships that are intent on destroying them and they’re being so calm about it. Ji-won has been more upset at a slow padd than at the prospect of being blown up in the near future.

Possibly it’s just that this used to be how they lived their live and it turns out that they’re good at it, and that this is what they should be doing, always. That the tight knot of anxiety and excitement in the pit of his stomach is something he loves and something he’s missed. It’s a thrill to watch those fighter ships fall even further behind as Ji-won calmly flies their ship towards the nearest asteroid cluster, which is something their ship can maneuver around and theirs can’t. It’s also really attractive.

Some of that calm falls away when Ji-won finally takes note of where their final destination is and takes his concentration off saving their lives to twist in his seat to glare at him. “Addy! Really?”

“Less yelling, more flying,” he orders and Ji-won grumbles but puts his attention back to where it’s most needed. “It’s relatively close and none of the residents are friendly with the Agency.” He pauses. “And we haven’t visited your father in a while anyway.”

“That’s by design,” he says.

“Your father loves you,” Adexios says.

“Loves me enough to hide us all out and let us park the ship in his yard, you mean,” he says.

Ji-won’s not looking at him, too busy watching the screen, so he doesn’t hide his smile. “Yes, well, it doesn’t hurt.”

“You’re dealing with the,” he briefly takes a hand off the control to wave it in front of him.

“Yes, alright,” he says. “Eyes on the asteroids.”

Ji-won shoots him a mocking grin, eyes lit up in a way Adexios hasn’t seen in years, and he can’t help but return it.

Whatever the fall out is from all this, seeing Ji-won like this makes up for a lot of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow/harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblrl.com


	8. Chapter 8

Tara doesn’t get a second to breathe. As soon as the anchor is returned and the door has shut, there’s a violent jerk as the ship speeds away from the Agency space station that slams her against the wall, sending a shape ache of pain all along her arm.

She’s going to kill Ji-won for that. Later.

As soon the ship stabilizes, she’s leaving the computer station and hurrying down to where the anchor is kept. It’s been five years and suddenly she’s not sure how she’ll survive another five minutes.

She opens the door to the hold with shaking hands, barely able to punch in the code.

It opens. There are two people in space suits, one with his helmet off, a dark skinned human she doesn’t recognize. She turns to the other, waiting, because what if something went wrong, what if that’s not her.

The helmet comes off, and then Roksana’s smiling face is looking at her. She’s got a nasty, swollen cut on her cheek and she’s thinner, the bones in her face more pronounced. “Patanasila Taraka,” she says, using the name she’d given her when she was a terrified little girl who’d been fascinated with the stars on her skin, when they’d both been children who didn’t understand anything but each other.

She’d been Tara ever since.

“Roksana,” she says, then she’s running to close the space between them, running to grab her into a crushing hug, even thought the space suit. Roksana is laughing as she hugs her back, and it’s been five years without her best friend, her heart sister, the best and most important person in the world to her, and now she’s here, back in her arms with her infectious laughter echoing off the walls.

“Your hair,” Roksana murmurs, reaching out a gloved hand before realizing it’s too big and clumsy.

Tara lets go so she can start efficiently undoing the buckles on Roksana’s suit, easing her out of the bulky outer later. “I didn’t have you to braid it for me anymore. It’ll grow back and then you can braid it again.”

She reaches to start unzipping the inner suit, but Rokasana hugs her again before she can, Roksana grabs her hands, squeezing. “I can braid it now.”

“Later,” she says, warm. They have time now, again. She turns to the other human, “Who’s this?”

Roksana steps away from her to strip him out of his own suit and he smiles at Tara a touch awkwardly. “My name is Isaac Roberts. I, uh, I was a professor. Before.”

Holy fucking shit.

“Isaac Roberts?” she repeats.

She knows her voice is doing something funny when Roksana pauses in pealing the inner suit off of Isaac to glare at her. “Yes, Tara. He’s the last traveler.”

“Right, the last traveler,” she says, like that’s something that matters. Or, well, it does matter, because that means they can stop scanning the earth for new arrivals, but that has absolutely nothing to do with her initial reaction.

Roksana reaches into the leg of her discarded space suit and takes something out. Tara has to struggle not to laugh as she sticks a navy captain’s hat on top her head and drapes the jacket over her shoulders. It’s ridiculous, that she has it, that she managed to steal it in the middle of an escape, that she’s wearing it now. It’s so _her_ that it does more to make Tara feel like she’s back than seeing her and holding her had. Sometimes people that come back from the Agency aren’t themselves, but she’s pretty sure Roksana is, that she hadn’t lost herself while spending five years searching for a miracle.

“Come on, we should head to the bridge. Get this this over with,” Roksana says, already heading towards the door. “Isaac, just stay back and don’t panic.”

Isaac mostly looks resigned to this set of instructions, so he must have gotten to know Roksana well while they were being held by the Agency together.

Tara grabs Roksana’s arm. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait? You can rest before you talk to them, go to your old room.”

“Who has the time?” she asks in light, airy way that has Tara narrowing her eyes. That’s how Roksana sounds when she’s keeping a secret.

She wants to question her, but whatever else has changed in the past half decade, this hasn’t. She’s still willing to follow Roksana’s lead no matter where it takes them. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m always sure,” she says.

The worst thing is that it’s true. Roksana Sassani is always sure. She’s just not always right.

~

Roksana’s side is on fire, pain cutting deeper than the wound really warrants. She ignores it. She has a lot of practice, and this is all too important to get derailed by a little bleeding. Reunions are tricky at the best of times and under the best circumstances, and this is hardly that.

She steps onto the bridge. She should take a moment to savor it, to be back in her home, with her people. Instead she barely glances around before saying, “I told you we’d need back up and this is what you bring me? What, were there no mercenaries available?”

Ji-won turns in his chair, face sharp in rage and the purple, pebbled bits of his skin shifting, like his blades are itching to come out. Tara rubs a hand over her face, but this is necessary. Getting Ji-won angry is the best way to get him honest, it’s the fastest way to get to the bottom of the anger and betrayal she’s left on simmer since leaving. She needs it to boil over so they can deal with it, and she can’t do this the slow way, the nice way. She doesn’t have the time.

“Roksana,” Adexios says, and he’s going for reproachful, but he’s still smiling when he turns to look at her, small and like he can’t help it. He looks the same as when she saw him last, but she knows he’s not the same, that whatever is wrong with his code has only degraded further in the years she’s been absent. “You look terrible.”

She tries to bite down on grin, knowing it won’t help her here. “I see your politeness servers have crashed.”

Those aren’t real, and if they were Addy shed them long before they met. He only rolls his eyes, but the joke about his malfunctioning code does exactly as she intended, which is piss Ji-won the hell off. “Watch it,” he says, voice tight. “I can still jettison you off this ship.”

“Throwing me off my own ship?” she asks. “Murdered by own crew? Is this a mutiny?”

“You’re not my damn captain! And I’m not your crew!” he shouts, switching the ship to autopilot with few quick, jerky movements of his hands. He stands, stomping over to her, and Tara tenses but doesn’t do anything. Yet. Roksana doubts she can’t count on that for long. Tara’s never gotten involved in any of her fights with Ji-won before, even when they turned physical, but before she had been better positioned to handle them. Fuck, the idea that Ji-won would be totally able to kick her ass without even trying now is so upsetting. She at least used to be able to give him a good fight. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“Your captain,” she answers, partially to piss him off but mostly because it’s true.

His blades start inching out from underneath his skin. “No. You don’t get to be that anymore. You don’t get to do this to us anymore. You fucked off, turned traitor and left us for dead on that fucking planet in the middle of nowhere.”

Okay, that’s just dramatic. “Yeah, I clearly spent five years getting all cozy with the Agency. And the planet was capable of deep space flight, I bet you weren’t there a week before you stole yourself a ship.”

“Three days,” Addy says, and Roksana can’t tell if he’s trying to help her or not, but it’s not Addy she’s worried about. She knows Addy forgave her as soon as she’d done it, knows that Addy wouldn’t have been fooled that easily.

Ji-won’s mouth goes into a flat, angry line, but he doesn’t snap at Addy. At the point where Ji-won isn’t holding his temper for Addy, that’s when Roksana knows they really have a problem. “That’s not the point. Everything we had was on this ship, which we thought had been destroyed, that you’d betrayed us, and we had to give up our whole lives and _hide_. It doesn’t fucking matter if you actually turned on the Agency or not. You still betrayed us. You still lied to us.”

“I lie to you all the time,” she says, easy. “But this is the one you decide to be stubborn about?”

He gets all up in her space, blades fully out, his purple pebbled skin moving around and over his tan human skin. “You _left us_. I should – how _dare you _– I’ve killed people for less, I’ve killed people _for you _for less, and you’re going to stand there and smile and pretend it doesn’t matter? I should slit you open and see if you’re still smiling when your guts spill in the floor between thus.”

“Oh honey,” she says, soft and slow and just like he hates, still smiling, “you’ve seen that before. You know that I do.”

He shoves the blade of his forearm against her throat and she’s surprised when he cuts her skin, when she feels a drop of blood trickle down her neck. He doesn’t usually indulge his Pugnator side like this. Or he didn’t used to, at least. “Keep testing me. I’ll let you choke on your useless fucking words.”

She takes a step closer, keeper her top half where it is, mostly, only moving forward enough to cut herself even deeper on his blade. The blood falling down her neck still isn’t much, but it’s a steady stream now instead of a trickle. She’s been playing this game longer than he has, and she’s been playing it better. She opens her mouth to say something else, to push him that much further, but pain lances up her side and instead she lets out a strangled cry and her leg gives out on her.

If Ji-won hadn’t pulled his arm away quickly enough, she would have cut her own head off on it. It’d be one thing if he’d just done that, but he’s holding onto her upper arms, holding her upright so she doesn’t fall to the ground, and it’s not a victory, but it’s gaining ground. “What the hell?” he spits, looking her over.

Isaac speaks up for the first time. “We got in a fight. Before. She got hurt.”

He hadn’t seen the full extent of her injuries, and if she hadn’t just nearly collapsed in front of all of them, she’d probably be able to play it off. It’s not the first time she’s been hurt, not the first time they’ve seen her hurt, not by a long shot, but all that means is that they know her. They know her limits, and the know what kind of injury it takes for her show it, for her to reveal her hand when she hadn’t wanted to.

She still tries, pulling back from Ji-won’s hands and saying, “It’s fine.”

“Out of the suit,” Tara snaps, “I should have made you get out of that thing downstairs.” Roksana means to protest, but then Tara is in between them, pushing Ji-won back as she tosses aside her captain’s jacket and undoes the zipper of the suit. Roksana tries to step away from her, but Ji-won’s hand is on her wrist, his grip tight enough that she can feel her bones creaking under her skin, and he only lets go and steps back when Tara starts pushing the suit down over her shoulders.

The splatter of blood falling to the ground as the suit opens makes her wince more than the pain of the wound.

Tara’s navy skin is periwinkle with fear. Roksana risks a glance down, and it’s not good. That’s an awful lot of blood and the wound has even blackened at the edges. It’s not deep enough for there to be any internal damage, but she has lost a lot of blood.

“Ji-won!” Addy says urgently, hovering anxiously over his shoulder, his electric blue eyes wide.

He nods, reaching for Roksana. “Yeah, I know. Come on, we have to take care of that.”

She takes several steps back, careful not to slip on her own blood. “No.”

Everyone stares at her. “No?” Addy repeats incredulously.

“No,” she repeats, looking at Ji-won. “You want me dead? Fine. You don’t have to do it yourself. All you have to do is wait. If you want me dead, then only thing you have to do is not save my life.”

“That’s not how this works,” he snaps, reaching for her again.

If she lets him heal her when he’s like this, she’ll never gain the upper hand again. She starting to feel kind of dizzy with blood loss, or possibly she’s been feeling dizzy since about five minutes after it happened, but it doesn’t matter. This isn’t a fight she’s willing to lose. “I don’t consent to receiving medical treatment.”

He freezes, his hands so close to her. He may be a killer, but he’s also a doctor. As a doctor, he’d never treated someone without their permission, never touched someone without their permission. She thinks he might break that code, if it’s her, if his other option is watching her die. But that’s not what she wants. If he does, he’ll never forgive himself, even though she’s manipulating him, even though she’s _obviously _manipulating him. He takes his morals more seriously than anyone else on this ship, probably because he has to play fast and loose with them so often, and he won’t forgive himself if he breaks them. He won’t forgive her, either, which is pretty counterproductive to her goal here, so she won’t make him. She’ll consent if it looks like he’ll do it anyway, since it’s not like she actually wants to die. But he doesn’t know that. He’s always so ready to think the worst of people, after all. Including himself.

“ROKSANA!” Tara shouts, “Stop – what are you doing?”

Ji-won is still staring at her, hands outstretched and not touching. His blades have all receded underneath his skin, the Pugnator skin shrinking back to it’s normal swirling patterns. When Ji-won is angry, they come out. When he’s afraid, they disappear. He hadn’t been able to control that reaction when she left and it looks like he still can’t. “Don’t do this.”

“If you want to treat me, you have to let this go,” she says. “These are your options. Either you want me dead or you don’t. Either I’m your captain or I’m not. Either we move on from this or we don’t.”

“That’s not how people work, Roksana!” He’s still not touching her even as more of her blood drips on the floor. He can pretend indifference when he’s giving her the equivalent to a deep papercut, but seeing all her blood pooling around them terrifies him. His mother’s species doesn’t bleed like hers and, even though he knows better, every time he sees a human bleeding, there’s a part of him that thinks there’s no way they’ll survive it.

She shrugs and says simply, “It’s how we work.”

He’s breathing hard, his eyes wide, hand still twitching towards her. “You abandoned us. You hurt us. Can you let me be angry about that for five minutes?”

“You’ve been angry about it for five years,” she says. “You’re done now. And if you’re not, you can be angry at my corpse. At least it won’t talk back to you.”

He’s shaking now, and she wants to hold him, wants to knock her shoulder into his and tease him and team up with Addy to make him laugh, wants to goad Tara into sparring with him just to watch him almost not hold back for once. She wants a lot of things. She always has, and she’s used to it, the wanting.

She’s pushing this. She shouldn’t. It’s a real dick move of her. But while Ji-won may live in shades of greys, he’s never felt in them. He has to choose. And she wants him to decide she’s worth choosing before he has a reason to explain her actions, before he can comfort himself with the why of what she did. She wants him to look at her, as gloriously fucked up and manipulative and mean as she is on her worst days, and acknowledge that he loves her even still, that she’s still his captain.

Because if he doesn’t do it now, then everything that comes after will be too bitter to swallow, will be tainted with wondering if he loves her just out of gratitude. She can live with leveraging his feelings for her to make him admit to things he doesn’t want to. She can’t live with the idea that he’s only playing at being her family instead of actually being her family. She’s had enough of that to last a lifetime and she doesn’t think she could stomach it from anyone on this ship.

Being captain only meant that she was the worst of them, not the best.

“Fine!” he says, glaring at her. “Okay. You’re my captain. I’ll get over this. Now will you just–”

She steps towards his hands, smiling. “Save my life. Please.”

“You’re the worst,” he says, pressing his hand against her side. “Come on, we need to get you to medical, I don’t have anything up here with me.”

“One second,” she says, and Ji-won presses even harder on her wound just to be an asshole, but it only makes her smile though the sharp rush of pain. She reaches into her pocket, takes out the hard drive Archi had given her, and tosses it to Addy. “You should start decrypting that. Isaac can help if you need it.”

Addy just looks resigned. “What is it?”

“The location and schedule of every human and partial human employed by the Agency,” she says. Their looks of shock would be satisfying if that was all, but she has to force down a grin, because that’s not even the best part. “And the user manual and complete code for Human Simulation Units.”

~

For a moment Ji-won loses his all the sensation in his body as he stares at the little drive in his boyfriend’s hands.

Addy’s mouth is parted. He licks his lips before speaking. “Is this – does this mean–”

“Anything wrong with you that’s down to coding, we’ll be able to fix right on this ship,” Roksana says. “Anything that’s hardware, we’ll know how to fix, even if we have to track down the parts, or make them if we have to. Addy, you’re going to be just fine. You’ll outlive all of us if I have anything to say about it.”

Ji-won looks to Tara, but her surprise has melted into satisfaction. Hearing they had information on all the humans being employed by the Agency has been a shock, but the manual had been expected. “Is this why you did it?” he asks, hands still pressed to her bleeding side, holding up most of Roksana’s weight. “Is this what you were after?”

She looks at him, and the mocking, cold look in her eyes has melted. They’re back to being soft and brown and warm as they look at him. He’d hated having human eyes as a kid when his father didn’t and obviously his completely Pugnator mother hadn’t, but Addy had always laughed and said that he and Roksana had the same eyes, and it had helped.

“You’re my people,” she says easily, as if the last five years hadn’t happened. “What else was I supposed to do? Sit back and watch Addy rust away?”

“I’m not going to rust,” Addy protests, but it comes out choked.

Unbelievable. “I’m still really upset with you,” he warns, bending down so he can grab her under her knees and lift her into his arms. He hurries to the medical wing. It’s easier just to carry her. She’s almost too light in his arms, even taking his strength into account.

She rests her head against his shoulder. “That’s fine. You can be angry too if you want. You’re just not allowed to hate me.”

As if he could ever manage that. It would have made that past half decade a lot easier.

By the time they make it down to medical, Roksana has passed out in his arms, her body cold and limp. He’s not that worried. He’s saved her from worse in the past. He doesn’t even have to regrow any of her internal organs this time around. He wipes the blood from her side, revealing the angry, deep wound. She’d been sliced by some sort of blade, one that had been treated with some sort of flesh eating poison. That will have to be taken care of first, before the blood loss. He pours bio-liquid to stop the bleeding and hold the skin together while it heals. It’ll speed up the healing processes as well, but the poison will get in the way, so he injects a strong but general antidote to just under the bio-skin. The bio-skin will break down the antidote in about a half hour, but he’s pretty sure that’s all it will need to reverse the damage caused by the poison.

“Does she need blood?”

Ji-won looks up and the human Roksana had brought with her is hovering in the doorway. He looks kind of shell shocked still, with an unhealthy pallor to his skin. “What?”

“Does she need blood?” he repeats. “I’m a universal donor, so. I offered to help Adexios with the drive, but he just said he’d let me know if he needed it.”

They have some iron based blood in storage that does the trick, but it’s not human, and here’s a human offering. Neither his nor Tara’s blood is compatible with Roksana’s, and they can’t use his doctor’s license to buy any for her like they can for themselves. It’s not possible to buy human blood, even synthesized, without alerting over a hundred different databases, so they make do. Ji-won almost says no anyway, just because the guy doesn’t look that steady on his feet, but he understands the urge to do something, to help. “That’d be great, thanks,” he says. “Pull up a chair.”

He knows he made the right call when the guy’s face practically melts with relief and he scrambles over to Roksana’s side. It’s easy enough to set up a blood transfusion between them, to see the rich red blood slide from his veins into hers.

“Are you doing okay?” he asks after a moment. He wants to go back upstairs and check on Addy, yell at Tara a little bit for keeping them in the dark – and that will be another conversation he and Roksana have – but he doesn’t want to leave Roksana alone, even though he knows using the bio-liquid always exhausts her, even without massive blood loss. He’d already set the limits for the smart needles on both ends of the blood transfusion. They’ll disengage as soon as it’s complete so it’s not like he needs to be here to supervise. But on top of generally not wanting to leave Roksana alone when she’s injured, he doesn’t feel comfortable leaving her alone with someone he doesn’t know, no matter how well intentioned he seemed.

The guy nods, tearing his eyes from Roksana to give him a weak smile. “Yeah. Thanks. Sorry, I – my name is Isaac. You’re Ji-won, I heard.”

“I am,” he says, but something is niggling at him. Surely it can’t be what he’s thinking. Surely even Roksana Sassani can’t pull off three miracles all at once. But his name’s Isaac. He’s human. Not just a traveler, but the last traveler. “What’s your last name?”

“Oh, Roberts,” he says, smiling at him.

Fucking hell.

“She found you?” he blurts, incredulous.

Isaac only blinks at him, his forehead creasing in confusion. “Found me?”

Oh.

He doesn’t know.

He doesn’t _know_.

Fuck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	9. Chapter 9

Adexios is working on decrypting the drive, and the bridge is quiet now. Ji-won and Isaac are down in medical with Roksana, so it’s only him and Tara on the bridge. It’s just the quiet sounds of him typing and Tara cleaning up Roksana’s blood. He’d like to say it’s a new dynamic between them, but actually it’s just one more thing that reminds him of the good old days.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” he asks, eyes still on the screen. “Not in the beginning, I understand that. But later, when you needed our help. You know if you’d told Ji-won, he would have been on board instantly. You wouldn’t have needed to lie or beg or threaten.”

Tara’s movements quiet behind him. She’s quiet for so long that he pauses the sequencing to turn and look at her. She’s on her knees, blue hands red, her hair falling over her face so he can’t see it. One more reason not to like her short hair. When it’s braided back, she can’t use it to hide. She looks up and seems startled to see Adexios staring at her, although she smooths her expression out in the next moment. “We didn’t know if it would work. No use getting your hopes up.” 

“And if it hadn’t worked? Would you have even told us why you did it?” he demands.

“I thought it was a stupid idea,” she says, and Adexios doesn’t take offense. He agrees with her. “I didn’t think it would work and that it would be a waste and she was going to end up dead or dead in all the ways that matter. But I did it because she asked me to and because the reward was so high, if she could pull it off.”

He presses his lips together for a tense, angry moment, doing his best not to say something he’ll regret later. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“She wasn’t going to say anything if she couldn’t get the manual,” she admits. “We were just going to make something else up.”

“And if she’d died?” he presses.

Tara laughs. It’s not a good sound. “Fuck, no, of course not. Why would we do that? What would that accomplish?”

“We would have known why,” he snaps, “We wouldn’t hate her.”

Her expressions softens and sharpens at the same time, turning sly, a look she learned from Roksana. “You don’t hate her. Ji-won doesn’t either, he’s just scared and hurt and pissed.”

“Yes,” he says. “He is.”

Tara rolls her eyes, for a moment reminding him so painfully of her teenager years that he has to stamp down on the urge to tell her to go to her room. “Ji-won deals with anger better than guilt. It would kill him if Roksana had died or something terrible had happened to her and he hadn’t tried to help, even though he obviously couldn’t have. Telling him would have just been cruel.” She pauses, considering, “I might have told you. Eventually.”

“And what? You would have just wandered the universe alone, with no one to braid your hair or mark your skin, carrying her secret to your own grave?” he demands.

She doesn’t even flinch. She’s thought of this before. It’s possible for the past five years, this is all she’s thought about. “Yes.”

“Why would you both risk that?” he asks, hating the way his voice breaks, hating all the ways he’d been designed to be as human as possible, even in the most embarrassing of ways. “The chance of success was so small and I’ve lived so long already.”

“I lost my planet before I was born,” she says calmly, and he knows, they all know. “My whole species has restructured themselves around that loss, becoming explores and travelers in an attempt to regain what we once lost, to find the supposed twin to our homeworld waiting for us out there, somewhere. Roksana lost everything when she was kidnapped and sent through as an experimental test subjects in the early time travel trials. She lost everything she’d known, everyone who’d ever mattered to her or had been familiar to her. We are tired of trying to hold loss in our hands and realizing its smoke in our lungs, that it can kill us but we can’t grasp it. We know loss, Adexios. And no matter how stupid I thought the plan was, I was going to agree to it. Not just because it was Roksana asking, but because it was for you. We’ve both lost so much and we weren’t willing to lose you. Not without a fight.”

He doesn’t realize he’s shaking until Tara’s arms around him, steadying him, keeping him from vibrating apart. Her hugs aren’t as good as Ji-won’s, but they’re pretty close.

“It was still a really terrible thing to do,” he says, pressing his face into her shoulder.

“Yeah,” she answers easily, not denying or excusing it. “It was. I’d do it again.”

At this rate, maybe he really will rust.

~

Isaac has spent a lot of time these past few months confused, so it’s not exactly an unfamiliar sensation, but he can’t make sense of the way Ji-won is looking at him. “Do you mean because I’m the last traveler?” he ventures, although he doesn’t know why that would get him this kind of reaction. He thought that had been made clear earlier, but there had been an awful lot of yelling and threatening and injuries, so maybe it had just slipped everyone’s notice.

Ji-won is still staring at him, not saying anything, and it’s not uncomfortable, but it is strange. He doesn’t feel the need to break the silence, even if this is all even more new and confusing to him than life on the Agency space station, because the person who’s usually so good at explaining things to him is passed out in front of him. He’ll wait for Roksana. She’s the only one on this ship he really knows anyway.

Ji-won reaches out to yank Roksana’s shirt up and he turns away, assuming it’s some other medical procedure. Which just means he’s unprepared when Ji-won grabs his wrist and presses his hand against the warm, smooth skin over Roksana’s ribs. “Do you feel that?”

“Uh,” he says, flushed all over. He tries to pull his hand back, but Ji-won won’t let him. “Are you – do you need me to help with something?” It’s seems wrong for him to have his hand pressed to her bare torso, even if it’s her doctor putting it there. Who’s also her friend, and maybe wants to kill her a little bit, but not enough to actually do it, and not so much that anyone had seemed concerned with him picking her up carrying her away.

“Focus,” Ji-won snaps, and he really is very scary with that scowl. “Do you feel that?”

It seems like the quickest way to get this to stop is to do as the angry alien says. He stops trying to get away and presses his hand flat against Roksana’s side, carefully pressing his fingers into her ribs, which he feels as if it’s easier than it should be. He’s not sure if that’s because they’d been starving her or because her plan had been dependent on her being small enough to hide in Archi’s cart, or some combination thereof. Ji-won sees the exact moment that he feels an odd bump against her rib, like the bone swells in a small area before shrinking down again. “What is that?”

“When they pushed her through time, she had a broken rib. Sometimes the journey through time heals people. Sometimes it tears them apart. To her it did that, healing her rib but not healing it correctly.” Isaac nearly raises a hand to his own chest, but stops himself before he can do more than lift his arm a few inches. “There are ways to fix it. The Agency didn’t, but it bothered her less as a child than it does now. Sometimes it aches, and I can’t even say for sure why, but it does, and it would probably stop if we took it out and replaced it with a synthetic one. It would be easy. Two days of recovery at most.”

He’s queasy just hearing him say that, but surely a thousand years in the future, a thousand lightyears from earth, there are so many things more impossible that replacing a rib as if it’s a tooth. “So why doesn’t she?”

“Because it reminds her of someone,” he says. “Roksana didn’t sign up to travel through time. She wasn’t even taken off street corners and made to disappear like so many of the early travelers. She was sold by her parents when she was just a little girl. And when she was all alone, with no one on her side, in a terrifying place, someone decided to help her. To protect her. So she won’t let us replace her rib. Because she doesn’t want to forget them.”

He’s staring at her side, at the outline of her ribs underneath her his hand. It can’t be. It’s impossible.

“They didn’t speak the same language, but they made do,” Ji-won continues, but his voice feels further away now. “Roksana had already figured out that people had a hard time with her name, even that young, so she simplified it. Down to the last two syllables of her last name. Do you know what her last name is?”

Isaac shakes his head. “I – no. Up until today I thought her first name was Roxy.”

Ji-won huffs out a quiet laugh at that. “Of course you did. She never shows her hand until she has to. Her full name is Roksana Sassani.”

Sassani.

Sani.

_Sunny_.

~

Thargelia had needed security personnel to carry Archi back to her office, since he’d managed to destroy his feet in a manner that didn’t allow him to walk back on his own. They’d wanted to stay in the office with her, saying that it was too dangerous to leave her alone, but Archi couldn’t even _stand_, what did they expect him to really do to her? She’d sent them away and locked the door behind them.

Now she’s sitting on the edge of her desk, her high heels kicked off and one leg daintily crossed over the other. It’s been hours, but neither of them have said a word, just looking at each other.

She breaks first. She’s already lost so much today, this little bit more is almost inconsequential. “You’re going to say that Sassani and Roberts hacked your programming. Hand over your main programming chip, I’ll implant the hack now. No one will suspect anything when it’s checked later.” Normally having their main chips wirelessly enabled makes her feel vulnerable, but times like this it comes in handy. She can install a virus and alter Archi’s programming without even having to shut him down first.

“No,” he says, calm and sure and utterly immovable.

She smacks her hand down on her desk with enough force that the whole thing shakes. A crystal frame with a stock photograph teeters over the edge and shatters. “Archi! You have to work with me on this, otherwise I won’t be able to keep protecting you.”

“Keep protecting me?” he echoes, his mouth twisting into a snarl. She tries to keep from flinching at the look and fails. “Do I look protected to you? I’m the smartest being on this damn station, you included, and I’m the damn janitor.”

“You’re alive,” she says softly. “That’s more than can be said for the rest of us.”

“Except Adexios,” he says.

She doesn’t flinch this time, but it’s only because she’s expecting the blow. “Adexios is the whole reason we’re like this to begin with. After he defected, the Agency decided that the Human Simulation Unites really were infected, they wanted to destroy us-”

“Adexios didn’t defect,” he says, cutting her off. “He was never one of us to begin with. He just didn’t want to die.”

Yes, exactly. “I don’t want to die either. I thought that you felt the same. There are certainly simpler way to kill yourself.”

“There are,” he says, and something about the way he says that makes a chill go down her metal plated spine. “But we wouldn’t have. We wouldn’t both be forced to dance to the Agency’s tune, if only you’d trusted him.”

“He didn’t mean it,” she says, something she’s said hundred of time before. By now it almost sounds like she believes it.

Archi doesn’t. “He did. We could have gone with him. We could have been part of Roksana’s crew. We’d be out from underneath the Agency’s thumb, and we could have done so much _good_, Lia.”

No one’s called her that in a long time. He hasn’t called her that in a long time. It’s surprising enough that it takes her a moment to find a response. “It wouldn’t have worked. She never would have accepted us.”

“Are you blind?” he demands. “She did accept me. She cried for me.”

“I’d cry for you if I could,” she said. That’s one of the functions they’d taken away from her when they’d put her in charge of the Agency. “Stop doing this. Give me your chip. Let me protect you.”

He sighs and reaches into the back of his neck, pulling out a small black disk that’s the source for all his programming, all his memories. She holds out her hand for it, eager to do this before he decides to be stubborn again.

He looks her straight on, his electric blue eyes meeting hers. “Goodbye, Lia.”

She stumbles, reaching for him, but she’s too late.

Archi crushes the chip in his hand and his body slumps forward.

Thargelia screams, prying open his hand. She can fix this, she’ll put the pieces back together, and if it’s not perfect it’ll still be good enough. The only thing in his hand are fragments so small that they’re little more than dust. It’s not something she can repair.

When her security finally manages to knock down the door, they find her curled in Archi’s lap. Her throat aches with the effort of trying to cry, with the painful gasps that are as close as she can get to sobs.

This is going to be really hard to explain to the investors.

~

Roksana wakes up on her back, too warm and tacky with dried sweat.

They must have used bio-skin on her. It’s effective, but she hates how it makes her feel. She wants a shower. She places a hand against her side, and sure enough she’s completely healed, nothing remaining of her injury but some muscle deep soreness that will be gone by this time tomorrow.

“You’re finally awake. We’re nearly there.”

She pops an eye open. Ji-won is sitting by her bedside his feet on the edge of her bed and a book in his hands. “You stayed,” she says, too tired to stop the pleased smile from stretching out over her face. He could have had Tara or Addy take his spot, if he was worried, but he hadn’t, he’s here.

“Well, considering you spent five years being tortured to save my boyfriend’s life, I’m considering not being as angry with you for as long as I’d been planning,” he says, not looking up from his book. “It’s a lot easier to not be angry at you when you’re not talking.”

That’s fair. “Where are we going?”

“Nator,” he says.

She pushes herself up, sitting cross legged on the bed and waiting, in case he’s joking. “Seriously? Why?”

“Do you think it as my idea?” he asks sourly. “Addy picked it. We can stay there without worrying that anybody following us.”

That’s because Nator is such a violent, war torn planet that going there without having a clan group ready to shelter you is basically suicide. Which they have, obviously, since it’s Ji-won’s home planet, but. “Surely in the last have decade we can’t have lot all our allies besides your father.”

“We’ll be protected there,” he repeats.

“Your dad hates me,” Roksana points out. “I can’t image that my most recent stunt has done anything to change that opinion.”

Ji-won is silent for a long moment. She’s trying to figure out what she’s said wrong, what she could have possible said that would get that look on his face. Eventually he sighs and says, “He was on your side, actually. He thought you had some sort of trick up your sleeve the whole time. Granted I’m pretty sure even he hadn’t thought you were trying to pull off something this big, but he doesn’t hate you. He trusts you.”

Huh.

“That doesn’t count,” she says. “Your dad’s an empath. He doesn’t trust me, he knows me. Trust requires faith. He trusts Addy, who’s mind he can’t read, and who he likes anyway. Your dad knows me, but he doesn’t like me, and it’s impossible for him to trust me. He starts reading every thought in my head as soon as I’m on planet.” Another reason she’s not thrilled about going to Nator. Ji-won’s father had never respected her privacy before, and she hardly think he’s going to start now. He doesn’t do it to everyone, just the people who lead his son into near fatal danger on a regular basis, so she can’t even be too mad about it. If she could make sure everyone that came near her people had good intentions, she’d do it too.

“Yeah, well,” Roksana winces at the bitter undercurrent in his voice, “maybe if I’d inherited some of my father’s skills I would have known better about you, about all of this.”

She hesitates for a moment, but then tugs the book out of his hands and grabs them in her own. It’s easy for them to fight, to be mean to each other one moment and flip it to kindness in the next, but it’s harder to just start out with kindness. After she’s been gone for so long, she doesn’t know how welcome her gentle touches will be, but thankfully he doesn’t push her away or pull his hands back. “Don’t do that to yourself. We lied to you because you cared too much about us, not because you didn’t care enough. We couldn’t have you trying to stop us or rescuing me before I was ready to be rescued. And you would have. I know it. You know it. If you loved me less, I wouldn’t have had to lie to you. You would have been okay with my risking my life for Addy’s.”

There’s no reaction for a moment, then his lips quirk up at the corners for just a moment before he takes his hands back and picks up the book again. “Sometimes you talking doesn’t make me angry.” She has a moment of quiet, content happiness before he ruins it by saying, “Oh, I told Isaac you were Sunny, by the way. I would have waited for you to do it except your record of telling people you love important secrets that you’re keeping for their own good is notoriously terrible, so.”

“Ji-won!” she snaps.

“Hey, remember that time you left for five years and let me think you’d betrayed and abandoned me after specifically promising never to do that?” he asks, picking up his book again and idly turning a page.

She pauses then asks, resigned, “This is going to be thing for you, isn’t it?”

“Oh yeah,” he says, not looking up from his book. “For the next five years at least.”

“How’d he take it?” she asks, dropping it.

“He cried,” he says. “He’s not mad at you, if you’re wondering, and he’s on the bridge right now working on the drive.”

She swings her legs off of the bed and hops to her feet. She only has a moment of being worried about falling over, and then she’s perfectly upright, hands on her hips and beaming. “Let’s go!”

“Take a shower first,” he says. “I know you feel gross. You can change into your actual clothes after.”

Oh, fuck, her own clothes. Her own shower in her own _room_.

“Don’t run after being healed!” Ji-won shouts after her. She waves an acknowledging hand behind her but doesn’t slow down. He’s been telling her that for years. Maybe one of these days she’ll even listen to him.

~

Tara should probably be down in the engine room, except she’s spent all her damn time in the engine room since getting Boomerang back, and she’d rather spend it here, sitting sideways in the captain’s chair and waiting for Roksana to show up and yell at her for it. She’d changed clothes after cleaning up in the bridge, a soft pink pair of overalls tied at the waist with a black tube top around her chest. It’s too nice to do any work in, and all she’s been doing for the past few years is work, so she can’t remember the last time she wore it.

Ji-won enters while Isaac and Addy are bent over the same console, muttering angrily about some strange code they can’t decipher. He takes one look at them and heads over to her instead. “Any real problems or are they just being dramatic?” he asks.

She shrugs. “How would I know? I’m an engineer, not a programmer.” There’s some overlap, of course, but not on something as complicated as whatever is flashing across the screen.

“Did someone say something about being dramatic?”

Tara grins as Roksana walks through, hair damp around her shoulders. She’s wearing dark leggings and a soft black and red flannel. Tara tries not to let the fact that Roksana’s probably wearing that because more structured clothes are too big on her now bother her too much. The captain’s hat Roksana’s wearing at an angle helps with that.

Isaac turns as soon as he hears her voice and Roksana makes a detour to go over to him. “Sorry I didn’t tell you who I was,” she says frankly, “I couldn’t do it where anyone could hear because if they knew, they would have used you against me, and typing out who I was in morse code against your neck seemed like an unnecessary risk.” 

Isaac doesn’t say anything, instead grabbing Roksana in a hug so tight that Tara’s almost worried that he’s going to break her ribs all over again. Maybe now that he’s here Roksana will finally let Ji-won replace her malformed rib. “It’s okay,” he says when he lets go. “It’s a bit weird that a few months ago you were a little kid and now you’re older than me, but I’m just glad you’re okay.”

Her smile in response is completely genuine. “I’m glad you’re okay too. Is there something you want to do or somewhere you want to go? We can set you up somewhere once we’ve laid low for a bit. We know a lot of people in a lot of places.”

Addy and Isaac share a glance. Tara looks down to hide whatever her face is doing. Clearly the two of them spoke while everyone else was away. “I want to stay here,” Isaac says firmly, “with you. You’re going to need help with Addy anyway, and I’m useful in a lot of other ways too.”

Roksana is the one to reach out for a hug this time. “You don’t have to convince me. You’re welcome on my ship as long as you want to be here, Isaac.”

Because everything is so perfect, this is when everything starts to go wrong.

The screens go black, Addy curses, and both Isaac and Roksana nearly trip over each other in their haste to get to a console. “A virus?” she demands.

“No,” Isaac answers, but he doesn’t sound sure. “That’s way too much code to be a virus. I don’t know what the hell that could be.”

Just as quickly as it starts, it’s over, the screens flickering to life again. They all look at each other uncertainly.

The intercom buzzes to life and a cool, masculine voice says, “Hello, Miss. It seems things didn’t go according to plan. I hope you don’t mind. I had a backup plan.”

Tara’s eyes narrow. That voice sounds familiar.

“Archi!” Roksana and Addy cry, although she says it with joy while Addy says it in disbelief.

Roksana turns to face one of the many cameras in the bridge. “Is it really you?”

“Yes, Miss,” his voice says, amused. “Just in case something went wrong, I uploaded myself onto this drive the day before our escape. It appears that was a wise decision. While I’d prefer a mobile body, that may take a while. I’m happy to help operate the ship until then.”

“Deal,” Roksana says immediately, bouncing on the balls of her feet she’s so excited. Tara rolls her eyes. Of course she doesn’t ask the rest of them. She’s the captain, after all. “This is what we’re going to do. We go to Nator, rest, and repair Addy. Isaac, you’ll be taking point on that and on building Archi a new body, but that’s going to take years just in scavenging the parts alone,” she shoots the camera an apologetic look.

“Then what?” Ji-won asks, but he already knows the answer of course. They all do.

“Then,” she says, eyes gleaming, “we go through our list and rescue every human and human descendent right from under the nose of the Agency contract they’ve been forced into.”

Tara doesn’t bother trying to stop herself from laughing.

They’ve all changed these past five years apart and the pain of that absence isn’t something that can be fixed in a day. They’re going to have to get to know each other again and get to know Archi and Isaac and how they fit in with them too. Things have changed and they’re going to keep changing.

But with Roksana in the center of all them, spine straight and a vicious grin over her face, it’s clear that some things stay the same.

That some things, no matter how lost, will always be found.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you like it!
> 
> i have a lot in this universe and i feel like wrote this more to get a handle on the characters than anything else, so i hope it was enjoyable for you!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


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